happiness on World

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

We pray to You our Lord, our Savior, our Merciful God, that all our sins may be forgiven. Our sins are like a straight jacket, binding us, and keeping us from relationship with You. Although we know w...

Our family started watching our Christmas movies early this year. We love Christmas Vacation , Charlie Brown’s Christmas, Home Alone (one and two), Rudolph, and Frosty the Snowman ...

While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.

People are realizing that what seemed important to them in their lives-materialism and consumerism-doesn't work at all to make a happy heart. It actually makes an unhappy heart. And an unhappy wor...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

What Determines Happiness?  Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we ha...

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

Ruut Veenhoven, the Dutch sociologist known as the “godfather of happiness research,” maintains the World Database of Happiness. And when he looked at all the countries of the world in terms of happin...

Until Christ completely cures us and this world, our happiness will be punctuated by times of great sorrow. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be predominantly happy in Christ. Being happy as the norm rat...

In him the day-spring from on high has visited the world; and happy are we, for ever happy, if that day-star arise in our hearts.

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

The film Shadowlands tries to capture the emerging relationship between C.S. Lewis and the American Joy Davidson, who would inevitably succumb to cancer. In one dialogue between the pair, the subject ...

Dawn grew up in a family in which she felt she had a fairly happy childhood. But in her adult years she struggled greatly with emotional, psychological, and physical maladies. She never felt a sense o...

Orgasms are one of the most sought-after experiences in life—which is strange, because it’s not like they last forever or even a few weeks, like a long-anticipated holiday. We’re talking about somethi...

George MacDonald, The Scottish author who had a profound effect on C.S. Lewis among others, once wrote a letter to his father about what he believed would be a great obstacle to his faith; that once h...

Considered perhaps the greatest guitarist alive, Christopher Parkening appeared to have it all. Signed to an international recording deal as a teenager, Parkening traveled across the world playing bea...

Charles Darwin, known for his theory of natural selection, noticed that his later life included a “loss of happiness.” While he never acknowledged that it might have been related to his changing world...

Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress, and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s ...

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Morality or duty . . . never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good l...

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the co...

One way to be unhappy is to lack what you most want. Another is to get all you could possibly want and discover that everything is never enough.

If I could just come down on that telling phrase – God wants us to be happy… but God doesn’t want us to be happy. God wants joy for us. But joy is something rather different from happiness. Joy is s...