Where is YOUR "bliss"?

On Fridays, I teach private music students at home, which allows me recovery time from an already sedentary job M-Th teaching our alternative school. The advantage/disadvantage of my condition: my bosses found a low-activity job that uses my skills to the maximum without exhausting me. It's the only reason I can still call myself a classroom teacher. But once a week, I get to utilize my music education knowledge again: I teach every band and orchestra instruments, piano, guitar, bass, banjo, whatever they bring to play. I even have a young man to whom I'm teaching composition. Versatility has its merits.

Additionally, one of my private students is struggling in his academic subjects, so occasionally I work with him on those as well; certainly I keep up with how he's managing in his classes. Today, he told me about a book he's reading, entitled The Geography of Bliss. It's by a man named Eric Weiner, formerly of NPR, and the premise of the book is that he went exploring the world "looking for happiness" - that is, researching the places that were considered the happiest places on earth: Iceland, Denmark, Bhutan, etc. They had different emphases - one values tolerance above all else; another emphasized inner tranquility, another staying out of each other's way.

And I found myself twitching.

Oh, I've no doubt Mr. Weiner means well, and even my student took the entire search with a grain of salt. But if you're a Christian as I am, you already know where I'm going to go with this, don't you?

Isn't our happiness, our joy, our bliss, supposed to come from having the Holy Spirit within us?

This young man's a Christian, after a sort (almost all youngsters are still searching for what that word really means for them, my children included). But it felt like my duty to clarify that concept to him, and perhaps some of you may need to hear it one more time as well.


There are two sides of the coin in the universe: there's what the world offers, and there's what the Holy Trinity offers. Christ Himself said in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:24), “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." We can either try to be satiated with the things that only money can provide - cars, houses, foods, even sex and companionship - or we can be fulfilled by the Holy Spirit within us, that perpetual joy which should reside in every Christian.

In my life, especially in recent years since my salvation, my temporal happiness has been strained to and beyond the breaking point. I've suffered through the illness, deterioration, and death of my beloved wife and soul mate, Melissa; my own illness and deterioration (not yet death, although at the New Year it looked bleak for a few days), the financial burden that comes with severe illnesses in this country (even before the quest to eliminate affordable health care by this Congress), and a number of other issues not worth bringing up to make the point. And yet, even when my day-to-day happiness might have been affected by these events, there was always still this joy within my soul that says, "I am the child of the living God, beloved and cared for regardless of anything else. How can the problems of this world affect me, when this is not my true home?  

Paul said in Philippians 1 that he would in truth prefer to die than live, if it were up to him, because this was only a business trip he was on:

"Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account."

No Christian should ever fear death. For us, it's simply a bus ticket directly home, do not pass GO, do not collect any worldly money. We are here on a business trip, to help the God we worship gather more people to His Side before we die. For that, "to remain in the flesh is more necessary" - otherwise, why would God have left us on earth? Wouldn't it be more reasonable once we're saved to simply take us up to Heaven? 

Maybe. But that's why we remain: to recruit for Him. What a wonderful job! So, be filled with joy, because we've got the best job in the world: salespeople for the perfect getaway! Our pay is infinite, although delayed, and the fringe benefits are to DIE for!