Image courtesy of Stuart Miles,/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net
My friend Bobbie introduced me to a wonderful new Facebook page this afternoon, and I decided to write about this quote from that page:
” Waiting for someone else to make you happy is the surest way to be sad.”
Accessed on 11/24/13 at https://www.facebook.com/buddhistbootcamp
Unfortunately, I have spent too many minutes, days, and years in the past waiting for someone else  or something else to make me happy. And this quote is right—-I got sadder and sadder while I waited. Now I know the decision to be happy is my own; no one else can change my attitude except myself. When I am able to “change it” in a positive direction I am much happier.
Just as other people can’t make me happy, getting some material thing I wanted or accomplishing something I wanted to accomplish can’t make me happy either. When I depend on someone or something outside of myself  to make me happy, I am, essentially, giving away all my power to a constant state of “wanting;” there is never enough to make the wanting go away. That feeling of being happy, of “having enough” or of “being full or whole” has to originate within myself by my act of consenting to receive God’s love.
In addition, my state of happiness needs to be based on my own  self-worth and self-validation. For me,  that means accepting I am a valid human being because God made me that way and because God loves me. I don’t have to earn that love or to buy my self-worth with “good deeds” or accomplishments. I don’t have to get it from other people. Actually, I can’t get it from other people. It is a gift from God, and to fail to love myself and to realize my own “validity,” just as I am, means I am failing to totally accept God’s gift of love and grace. I have learned seeing myself as unworthy of God’s love is a form of false-pride; it is thinking I am unique enough to be beyond God’s love and grace.
I don’t know if any of this is making any sense. I am reminded of a conversation I had with my rector this morning. He was talking about “being saved” by God’s grace. I interrupted him to ask him, “Saved from what?” My question was prompted by the fact that many years ago my step-father asked me what Christians meant by the term “saved?” Specifically, he asked me, “Saved from what?” I didn’t know how to answer him, but today I have a better idea because I know I am saved from myself and my own self-will by God’s grace.
My rector answered my question about the meaning of being saved from what by saying, “From being separate  from God.” Earlier in the same lesson, he had said sin was, in fact, being separate from God. His comments made sense. Somehow,  the phrase “being separate from God” makes a lot more sense to me than the word “sin” with all its traditional connotations of evil and damnation.
I doubt my step-father would have been able to understand what is meant by being separate from God. In my own spiritual journey,  I have come to love and value being surrounded by, immersed in, and joined with the love of God. Without it, I would still be trying to find other people, places, or things to make me happy when all along the source of true happiness, God and God’s love, have been within me just waiting for me to acknowledge, accept,  and consent to our union. And,  if that is being saved, than I can truly say I am grateful for being saved.
Please comment and share your thoughts about today’s topic. May God bless and keep you.
Living One Day at a Time 
And then, too, people like you and Bobbie make me happy by making God’s love visible, tangible to me. –Pat
________________________________
Pat—you are one of the strongest manifestations of God’s love I have encountered. I thank you for being a part of my life. Kathy
I am struggling to retrain my daughter from this trap. We have a terrible problem with shopping. It is a battle from the beginning of the store to the end. I gave her a bracelet with different color beads. The blue is for greed, but we have also discussed the greed is a way she has learned to keep herself from feeling empty. The things she buys are just like food: they feel good at first but then the thrill is gone and the emptiness inside returns. So many addictive behaviors seem to have their roots in this emptiness, an emptiness that is the alienation from God, who alone can really fill us and make us whole. I never thought of myself as an addict because, as the song goes, “I get no kick from cocaine….mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all” but the kick I was looking for was from another person, a person who didn’t have anymore of a clue than I did about the God-sized hole in all of us that can’t be filled by anything other than Him.
What you’ve written is both profound and poignant. It says it all. I can only say thank you and God bless and keep you as nothing else can.