Have Haphazard Happenings Haplessly Affected Your Happiness? Perhaps
What do happiness and happening have in common? Hap. Both words together with hapless, perhaps and haphazard share this common root. Hap in Middle English means good luck. Understanding this origin may help us distinguish happiness and joy or gladness.
The adjective of hap is happy i.e. having the characteristic of or pertaining to good fortune. We normally associate this word with an emotion. When hap occurs, it is said to have happened. Happiness is happening dependent. It comes and goes like luck. A person who seeks happiness seeks favourable occurrences. When good happenings go, the state of hap may not last.
The word joy has not changed its meaning from Middle English and Old French. A word akin to joy is glad. Glad means shining or smooth in Middle English and smooth or bald in Latin. When one is glad, one shines forth from within. A glad person shines, beaming away, simply radiant. As shining as a bald head? Perhaps.
A person who passed his exams with distinctions or has won a million dollars has reasons to be happy and glad. When one is in such as a state, he floats on cloud nine. He shines forth with exuberance. The euphoria dies when his exam results is old news and his money is spent. His happiness wanes. He may have to wait for the next hap to occur before happy days are here again. When the reason to be happy dies, another reason is sought. The search for happiness continues.
If a Christian’s `joy’ is hap-dependent, he may frequently search for occasions which gives him an emotional boost e.g. religious hype with beautiful singing and music accompanying rah-rah sermons. Once the effect dies, he may think he is no more spiritual and God does not love him anymore. Quite hapless because it is a misuse of the word `spiritual’ and a terrible lack of understanding of God’s love.
John 15:9-11 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in His love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete”
John 17:13 “I am coming to You now but I say these things while I am still in the world so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them”
Jesus gave us a reason for joy which will not die. The “reason for hope”(1Pet3:15) is based on the death , burial and resurrection of Christ (1Cor.15:3-4). Because of this reason we are to rejoice in the Lord (Phil.4:4). The early Christians faced many hapless situations:
Heb.11:35-38″.. tortured….trails of mocking, scourging…..bonds and imprisonment… stoned ….sawn asunder…death by sword… in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreatment….wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground”.
The faithful had reasons to be unhappy but they focused on their reason of hope, Jesus. It then became easier to repent from lies to truth; dishonour to honour; unjust to just; impure to pure; ugly to lovely; evil report to good report; depravity to virtue; curse to praise.(Phil.4:8). In the midst of adversity, Paul could declare “I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me.” He made things happened in Christ. He did not wait for hap. His joy was independent of happenings and hype.
(I first wrote this article when I was working in San Diego in the mid 1990s. First published by PP church , Singapore and Escondido church, California)
Add comment December 6th, 2008
