meh..

My cat died on July 5.
I cried harder than I have in over a decade.

I know it was "just a cat," but from that day on, I started looking at things a little bit differently. Not because my cat died, but because my cat died. There's something about experiencing death for the first time when you're old enough to actually understand it. My grandpa died when I was in fourth grade. It didn't hit me like this. This time was different. Because on July 5, it hit me: death happens. And after realizing that death happens, the next obvious epiphany was that life happens. And that life is precious and so, so fleeting. So of course I fell under the Hallmark Card spell of believing that we must "live each day to the fullest," and that "life isn't measured by the number of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away" (haha that one is just ridiculous)...{insert flowers and rainbows here}. As I went through the process of making a prodigious decision (more about that to come later), I told myself, life is short-there is no time to waste in being unhappy. Maybe you know the drill. But somewhere in all of that, I got to wondering why I am here. Cheesy quotes don't exactly coincide with the biblical idea of placing our hope in the future, the life after. But if we are to live here with all of this future-life-hope, why are we even here? Are we not meant to enjoy this ephemeral time, to relish this life before it ends all too quickly? Is the Hallmark mentality right? I ponder the subject of happiness and wonder what role it is to play in our hearts. And I pause upon the awareness that peace, comfort, and happiness are not the same. Peace, we should have. The Prince of Peace lives in us. Comfort, we should not have. God dares us to step out of our comfort zones, dip our toes into an ocean of grace and unimaginable blessings, and dive in. But happiness? Where does that fall? God created us to give us joy, right? Are happiness and joy synonymic? Maybe they're not...maybe one can have joy without happiness. Maybe you can have happiness without joy...but who am I to say? So yes, put a check next to joy- we should be overwhelmed with Joy in the Lord our God, but that leaves my question unanswered. What about happiness? It would seem to make sense that God wants his sons and daughters to experience happiness on earth. In my thought process, I came across the idea that maybe he gives us happiness to show us what we are missing. Because happiness, it comes in spurts. It temporarily fills us. We sip on it casually, yet we are still thirsty. We thirst for something far greater than this life's happiness. Joy, however, is a taste of heaven. Joy is deep. Joy lasts. We look at joy in a way similar to how we admire the lilies of the field. We realize that what we have (our happiness)--the wisest king in all of his splendour--simply does not compare.

So where does the spider web of the previous paragraphs leave me? Well, I think all of this adds up to say that there are two kinds of happiness: happiness, and Godly happiness (also known as Joy). It appears to me that [my definition of] happiness and God's plans do not necessarily go hand in hand. More to come about all of this...hopefully soon.