Searching for Happy in 2022

It’s 2022! Are you happy? Does your life have meaning and purpose?

Welcome to our new More Than a Carpenter blog series, in which we focus on Jesus! Let’s get started with this quote by Thomas Aquinas, the famous philosopher and theologian: “There is within every soul a thirst for happiness and meaning.” Do you agree?

Some people feel this “thirst” early. Others only become aware of it in the moments life slows down and they get quiet. Some people notice it as a vague annoyance. Others feel it acutely, like physical pain.

Josh first began to notice his thirst in his early teens. “I wanted to be happy,” shares Josh. “I wanted my life to have meaning. I became hounded by the three basic questions that haunt every human life: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?“

Josh felt an emptiness, but also a smoldering rage from the physical and emotional abuse he endured at home. Just a kid, he didn’t know how to handle either. But when he escaped to college, Josh decided to find answers, to grab the great life the world owed him for all he’d been through. But where to start?

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Searching for “Smart” Happy and Meaning

Josh had grown up in a religious farming community, so he first looked for answers in church. He picked one near school, showing up whenever the doors were open. Josh found that he felt worse, not better, when he was there. Intellectualism was paramount to Josh; being told to “have faith” wasn’t going to cut it with him. How could people be so silly to blindly believe what they were taught?

“I thought Christians were walking idiots,” Josh admits. “They told me what they believed, but they couldn’t give me any common sense, intelligent reason for why they believed it.”

Chucking Christianity, he turned to his professors for answers. He says he quickly became their most unpopular student by pestering them with his questions. Josh found that his frustration mounted, when he realized that his professors seemed to be as clueless as he was about how to be consistently happy or find meaning.

Spotting a student wearing a T-shirt that said, “Don’t follow me, I’m lost,” Josh decided the sentiment summed up the wisdom his university could offer.

Josh then tried to fill the void by becoming a student leader on campus. His efforts gained him prestige and power, but even they failed to fulfill him. By now Josh was miserable — but hiding it so well that his friends thought he was the happiest guy on campus. They didn’t catch on that Josh’s mental state depended entirely on his circumstances. “I was like a boat out in the ocean tossed back and forth by the waves,” he says. “I had no rudder, no direction or control.”

Josh admits that he only made it through the grind of each week by partying hard on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.

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Was anyone truly happy, he wondered? Or, like him, was everyone just faking it, getting through life with the crutch of their own unhealthy habits?

Josh happened to notice a group of eight students who looked “disgustingly” happy — and consistently acted like it. They were nice to each other as well as those outside their group. What “happy” pill were they taking? A few weeks later, Josh got the chance to ask. The answer was NOT what he was expecting.

Join us for next week’s blog post to hear how this conversation unexpectedly set Josh on the path of pursuing the God he thought only silly people could believe in!

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