Bill Giovannetti - Secrets to a Happy Life: Finding Satisfaction in Any Situation

God Is Happy

We all desire to be happy. That is something that is innate in human nature; nobody wants to be miserable, though I am aware of the fact that there are people who seem to enjoy being miserable and some who seem to find their happiness in being unhappy!

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I cant dance.

Whatever muscles are supposed to swivel my hips seized up decades ago. My sense of rhythm puts me in a league with tambourine-wielding preschoolers. And the closest thing I have to moves looks like the human equivalent of a cat hacking up fur balls.

In my mid-twenties, I sat at a wedding reception, hanging out with friends. A young woman approached me to dance. I didnt know her; I was sure my soon-to-be-ex-friends put her up to it. My ears turned blazing hot, my face turned red, and I said, No thanks.

Miss Dance-a-lot didnt like that answer. She grabbed my arm and started pulling me onto the dance floor.

I panicked.

Um, no thanks, I said, voice quavering like a scared ten-year-olds.

Come on! Itll be fun.

Music pounded. Lights flashed. Bodies moved. Sweat poured.

I refused. All I could think of was the humiliation of a crowd of people watching me wiggle my body in ways it doesnt know how to wiggle, with a woman I didnt know.

I did the only thing I could.

I held on to my chair. The flirt dragged the chair, with me in it, about ten feet, digging a nice scratch into the shiny hardwood floor. My friends laughed so hard liquid spewed from their nostrils.

God will repay them.

I wanted to die. The disco lights hypnotized me. The girl clawed at me. I clamped a death grip on my chair, figuring if we were going to dance, there were going to be four extra legs involved.

By the time we scraped our way twelve feet, my new main squeeze gave up and skulked away.

Thank God.

The floor remains scratched and my soul remains scarred.

I am sure plenty of dance instructors will read this and think they can work their magic on me. Put some hip-hop into this dance-challenged geek; woo me with their ballroom floor charts and do-si-dos.

Not going to happen.

Because, aside from the fact my body is physically incapable of the sultry moves on Dancing with the Stars, my deep-seated emotions long ago placed dancing on permanent lockdown.

I cant dance because I had it drummed into my head as a kid that dancing was a sin. God frowned on it as a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

That anti-dance brainwashing was part of a larger religious package. No movies, no drinking, no card-playing, no drums, no holding hands with the opposite sex, no... if youve seen Footloose, you get the picture.

Excessive fun was taboo.

Why?

Because God was not to be trifled with, and he was most pleased when I was most unhappy. At the core of my young faith squatted the ogres of self-denial, self-abasement, and self-sacrifice. Too much happiness was a sin, and self-interest was the root of all evil.

My religious upbringing offered an odd combination of good and bad, love and condemnationthe best of times and the worst of times. Im grateful for it, but there was a lot of unlearning to do.

Especially in the happiness department.

I had to learn that in the plan of God, unhappiness was not a virtue. Im sure some readers are already saying, Duh. Bear with me, because a whole lot of people need to be delivered from the delusion that God is the Lord of Party Pooping.

God is happy. God is not miserable. He doesnt have bad days. Isnt moody.

Heaven is a party God throws for everyone who wants in on the action. Complete with dancingJesus said so (Luke 15:25).

God wants you to be happy. He designed you to seek happiness like a moth seeks light.

C. S. Lewis wrote, If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion... is no part of the Christian faith.

True.

God wants you happy, and, if you walk his path, you can be happy.

You can even bust a move.

An old-time preacher named Billy Sunday said, If you have no joy, theres a leak in your Christianity somewhere. Thats what Im talking about.

When I imagined God unhappy, life made me unhappy.