To Today's School-Age Parent: Do I just want my child to be happy?
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Is that what I want? My child to be happy? Is that only, most importantly or mainly what I want? Or is there maybe a higher vision, a better reality that I want for my child?
Last week, we considered how today’s feelings didn’t necessarily give me a guide to wisdom and the best decision-making, even though those feelings still mattered. Today, let’s look at whether “happy today, and most all tomorrows” is what I want for my child.
Often, today’s feeling highlights my child’s happiness and his or her current set of desires. Most any parent wants more than that for your child, but pretty much every parent is often tempted to meet today’s powerful cry for happiness from our children and, honestly, from ourselves to please our children.
My own personal happiness often registers pretty high on my agenda as well. The internal dialog goes something like this: “I know what would make me happy. I want…..” I start assuming my happiness is exactly the purpose I want to serve right now. Then I go on to decide that my happiness will be served by getting what I want. Think as a parent how much of my child’s good I boil down to his happiness defined as his wants right now.
Look at the Bible’s take on this subject. Consider “happiness” and “joy”. First, a caution. We’re talking translations to the English words. One word is not more spiritual than the other. I’ve heard too many sermons through the years speak as if one was God’s “word” and one wasn’t. What I’m offering are remarks about tendencies of Biblical language. They also, though – being about the Word of God – relate to revealed truth about our lives and the way things really are whether we like it or not.
“Joy” is chara and comes from the same root as charis or grace. We might, if this were an English word, best translate chara as “rejoicefulness,” a recognition of grace-filled living. Since the English we have is “joy” though, that’s what we use.
“Happiness” translates the Greek word makarios which comes from the same root as “blessed”. As we said, not an obviously ‘less godly or spiritual’ word connection than “grace.” They do, however, translate different points of view.
Happiness is mostly about having received desired things – feeling blessed – and being cheered by it. Joy is more about recognizing a grace-filled condition and rejoicing because of it.
Joy happens amidst pleasant or desired circumstances, but it is also experienced amidst hard and challenging conditions. Happiness happens mostly as desires are fulfilled. Happiness is a condition, while joy relates to a choice, an action, a decision to see grace in the ups and downs of life.
Let’s listen to what our Lord Jesus wants and is doing for us as His own. In John, chapter 15, the Good Shepherd is speaking of the vine and the branches, telling us in verse 5 to “abide” in him. He goes on in verse 11 to say “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” Jesus wants our “joy” to be full!
In the Bible, we read of happiness about 20 times while we get to hear about joy more than 200 times. It is more fully expressive of what our Heavenly Father desires for us. He wants to bless us, but all the more, He wants us to live as people who are enjoying the favor and blessing of God because we are His and He loves us.
Psalm 16 – We experience joy in His presence. Psalm 51 – David cries our while despairing in his sin that the Lord would “restore” to him the “joy of your salvation.” Luke 2 proclaims “good news of great joy” about the birth of Jesus. Paul offers the blessing in Romans 15 – “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him.” Hebrews 12 tells us that Jesus, for “the joy set before him” endured the Cross. And the Jude Doxology proclaims that he “is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy”!
As a parent, I want to want for my child a gift that gives to them in the good and bad, happy and sad times. I want them to enjoy a fulfilled spirit when the blessings have come and when the blessings are still to come.
What might this mean in practice? Likely, it means my daddy heart is going to hurt a little bit when I want to defend and rescue and protect and assist my child. Of course, I need to do all those things at the right time and for the right reasons. But it also means there will be times when I want to because I want my child to be happy and to be it now! I need to resist the desire because I want so much more for my child to know true, sustaining joy.
In practicing joy, a habit and privilege of “rejoicefulness”, my child will also grow in strength and faith and confidence and courage, in resolve and toughness and patience and long-suffering. To be happy, given as a relatively quick and easy gift from an intervening parent, my child might well get with it a crippling load of conceit and arrogance and resentfulness and fragility, of laziness and selfishness and weakness and indifference. That gift I do not want to give to the child I love more than my life!