Blog # 116 GENUINE HUMAN HAPPINESS

Blog # 116 GENUINE HUMAN HAPPINESS Did you ever look back into history at certain men and women with admiration and say within yourself that you wished you had the opportunities these men and women had? Did it ever appear to you that you were born too late? If only I had the opportunities this or that particular person had ! If only I had been born in that first Century, like St. Peter. How happy I would be! Actually none of us was born when we were by accident as far as God is concerned. Nothing happens by accident with God. We can learn a great deal from how others achieved happiness, and did great things years ago, but we must realize that for ourselves the time to be great and happy is not eleven Centuries ago or fifty years ago, but now. Where is our happiness and greatness to be found? In God. Each of us has something that God wants and which nobody else but ourselves can give, and that is our love. God doesn't need any great heroic deeds that we might do with the attitude that we are doing God a favor. God told us this long ago, in Psalm 49, and it holds good for us today as well. God's people were sacrificing valuable goats and oxen to God as if this were something He had need of, and at the same time were disobedient to His will in other matters. God had told them He had no need of sacrifices but He wanted their love, which could be symbolized in sacrifice. If God were hungry, as He says in Psalm 49, He would not have to tell us about it in order to get something to eat. All of the world is His, and everything in the world is kept in existence by the force of God's will. The people were neglecting the most important part of their obligation toward God when they failed to join their sacrifice with love and obedience, the very things of which their sacrifices were to be a sign. This too is what Jesus tells us in Matthew 7: 21, when He says that not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven but he who does the will of my Father in Heaven shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In order to be completely and genuinely happy we must love God. And if a person were to think of complete happiness in terms of anything else than God that person has not imagined what complete happiness is. He would be like a rose, perhaps, that might say to itself there is no greater beauty than my own. Both would be wrong. But a rose can not do this. A man or a woman can. Complete genuine human happiness is achieved only in God, knowing God and loving God. We can no more change this than a rock dropped from the roof of a building, could fall up instead of down!