Thursday 12th October

I recently started looking up 'obvious' web addresses on the 'net, and found, among others, a magazine thingy at happiness.com. There's a quote saying, "We'll make your life better!" and it just made me think. Take happiness for one thing - how much time do you actually spend being happy? And how much of this is caused by reading magazines? That's not fair, actually, as I haven't read the magazine, I'm just a bit unsure what it is I'm trying to say.

I guess I'm thinking that happiness isn't that important. (As opposed to joy - I'm getting so good at Christianese!) No-one (as far as I know) spends their whole life being happy, and I honestly think that if I was happy all my life I would be a very shallow person - I think that, to start with at least, we need to be miserable, desperate, hopeless etc. to ever consider the important issues of life. How will I be confronted with my own (apparent) mortality if the shadow of death never falls across my path?

Equally, if life was one long haul of misery, unrelieved by encouragement or pleasure, I would probably be downtrodden and despondent. How could I understand hope if I never saw good things coming to those who waited?

So maybe hope is the thing - I have this kind of feeling, kind of like happiness and misery, which I think may be hope. And it's hope in God, and I'm sticking to it, and to him, no matter what anyone thinks, says or does. So there.