Happy Face 16

It isn't simpoly a matter of putting on a happy face, Gentle Reader. Everyone is going to know you are faking it. Nor would it be appropriate to walk, drive, bus, cycle or skateboard everywhere looking miserable, because misery is every bit as contagious as joy. You could simply pretend that you're happy and simply stuff all your problems and issues into three black garbage bags and hide them away, where they will rot and fester till even you end up having to smell it and no one is going to be fooled. It is a matter of finding the joy that is within and accepting it as a gift, even if doesn't appear to exist, but it's still present, if only as one solitary tiny ember, or as the thinnest golden thread. Following a particularly dark period in my life, when I had just been homeless and was showing symptoms of undiagnosed PTSD, I mentioned to a friend that now I could finally be happy. This friend had been involved with me for six years in intentional and brutally intense Christian community, and she didn't think I had a right to be happy. She was not particularly bright, and never was able to see me as a human being with human value, only as a kind of life support for intense Christian ministry, and that mine was always to be a life of martyrdom and suffering. Fortunately for me, this person is dead, and actually ended our friendship a few years later after I began to really call her on her bullshit. Not that I'm dancing on her grave. I'm not, but as she discovered that I was more than just a life support for Christian ministry, let's just say, that the friendship really began to cool. Still, around that time, even as I was just emerging out of the darkness, I came to see that I had a gift and capacity for joy. I think this came as the fruit of gratitude, because I felt then, as I do now, that God had just rescued me out of the darkest of pits and the gratitude soon gave birth to joy. I am not always happy. I have some days that are quite dark, difficult and trying, and any regular reader on these pages is going to know this about me. Knowing that I am not alone in the universe, and really, no one is alone in the universe, and that God is always here with me, really gets me through the darkness. I might not feel it at the time, and there are moments, even days, when the darkness and loneliness are the only overriding reality. We are living right now, all of us, with some unprecedented and huge global challenges, and I think that the most effective way of meeting these challenges will be with the joyous certainty that we are in better hands than we every would have imagined or realized. I don't care if some of you don't believe in God, God still is. This is his world and we are his creation, and we also have a holy responsibility to care for and protect the earth. We do not know the outcome, but we still need to shift our perceptions, if only to refuse to accept that the greedy billionaires and their puppet politicians who seem set on destroying the planet do not have the ultimate say, they do not have the last word, and we are going to win this war.