Gentle Happiness

Last updated on: November 28, 2015 at 11:40 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Gentle Happiness 2015-11-28T23:40:32-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Happy with Normal, Normal as the Kingdom

The world is hurting, but we cannot always be looking outward. I have hurts, death in my family, assorted failures, but I cannot always be looking inward. Instead, following the example of Jesus, I try to go apart. Sometimes the cares follow me, as they did Jesus, but often I can stop and rest.

Just now, Hope is in the kitchen making something delicious for dessert. Lewis is setting up our Christmas village. The other adult children are reading, napping, or chatting with friends in the house. And I am writing awash in the goodness of family, this life, and God.

Nothing special is happening, but everything is special. This is a night like many other nights, but God is here. He is always here, but sometimes I am too focused on the problems to see, hear, and taste Him.

The trick of a happy life, despite depression, sins, and sorrows, is not to focus always on self or on external circumstances. There is a calm center, an eternal place, where joy can be found always. This is the Kingdom of Heaven and as Jesus proclaimed it, is all around me and within me.

I can be still. This is not passivity, God forbid, but a calm content to be surrounded and permeated by mercy, grace, peace, and joy. None of it is because of me. None of it is controlled by me. All of it has survived wars, rumors of wars, and disasters for centuries.

Finding this Kingdom requires two things: avoiding being weird, accepting God in the normal and not just the startling, and turning away from the world, the flesh, and the devil. This includes this present time, my flesh, and the devils of our age.

A magician, the lover of devils, seeks occult manifestations of power, but fails to find the Kingdom. The Kingdom will give no power to the man who tries to buy it with money, sacrifice, or ritual. The Babbitt, the lover of the world, looks to convention and normalcy to exert control over his external and internal world. He makes mockery of the Kingdom by reducing the Power and the Glory to mere middle class, morality which shifts with the party platform of his local establishment. The Vegas lounge lizard looks for pleasure in wine, women, and song. The college aesthete looks for pleasure in the right wine, the right woman, and very best songs, but both the sensualist and the snob miss the Kingdom.

Most frightening is the worker . . . the churchman who hastens to do God’s work . . . and misses the Kingdom for his business.

For me, this begins by being still. I must stop churning away. I must turn off all entertainments, listen, look, smell, feel. Yet there is a danger there of the “mystic experience” of going inward and not loving the real people around me instead of some ideal. So I get up and quietly help with a task, I talk, I accept that reality that nothing is perfect yet, but all things are becoming new.

God is real and He made the world, the flesh, and angels. Bad choices broke goodness, but God is making the crooked straight and the rough places smooth. God is coming and God is here. There is nothing mystical, magical, or special about tonight except that the Kingdom of Heaven is here.

God is where you are. God is there. Goodness, truth, and beauty are in things as they are. For a moment, see the good with the brokenness and rejoice in both: the Kingdom come and the Kingdom coming.

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