“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.”  Anne Frank

What does happiness look like to you?

A happy heart makes the face cheerful.  (Prov. 15:13a; NIV)

Zig Ziglar has long been one of my favorite speakers and authors.  Coming up on 30 years ago, he wrote a delightful little book entitled Confessions of A Happy Christian.  (I still strongly recommend the book as its message is timeless.)  In that book he writes, “Many times I hear people talk about someone being a ‘negative’ Christian.  I challenge that terminology.  I’m convinced that you can either be negative or you can be a Christian, but you can no more be negative and Christian than you can be Christian and Communist.”  What Zig is describing as an impossibility is also sometimes called an oxymoron, i.e., a combination of incongruous or contradictory terms.

Hmmmm…I don’t know about you, but I recall meeting several of those oxymorons over the years…in fact, for far too many of those years, I would have to confess to being one myself.  (Just ask some of those who knew me back then.)  However, I have concluded that happiness is like a lot of other things in life–it’s a choice.  In other words, all kinds of “things” happen during the course of a lifetime or even during the course of a day.  And when one or several of those “things” happen, I can choose to see them as bad, evil, out of my control, devastating, unlucky, et al., or I can choose to view them in a more positive light.  It’s always my choice.  I can choose to dwell on the “thing” and let it pull me down or I can make the choice to think about something that brings me happiness and joy.  I, all by myself, make the choice.

Back in September, today’s link was brought to my attention.  I found it to be incredibly powerful.  It’s called “30 Happiness Tips:  Program Your Life for Optimum Enjoyment.”  Note the key word “program.”  Not to turn this into an English class, but the implied subject in the phrase “program your life” is YOU!  You program your life for optimum enjoyment.  That means you can do it.  It’s your choice or your decision to make.  And the author offers no less than 30 things you can do to make the choice for happiness.  The 30 tips are so good that each one of them could easily justify its own Daily Gram.  In fact, I like that idea.  Expect to see some of these tips  show up again in the weeks to come.

Once you understand that happiness is a choice, I have only one question left…why would anyone knowingly choose unhappiness?

Prayer Power
Lord, thank You for showing me that my happiness is up to me rather than up to You.  Forgive me for those times, even still to this day, when I choose to wallow in self-pity.  Grant me the grace to quickly see the dead-end involved in making that choice and quickly replace it with the better alternative.

Link of the Day
30 Happiness Tips

Blessings on you as you try one or more of these happiness tips this weekend.