Happiness is a choice

The king was overjoyed and gave orders to lift Daniel out of the den. And when Daniel was lifted from the den, no wound was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.                            Daniel 6:23

 “Happiness isn’t something that depends on our surroundings,” Betsie ten Boom told her sister in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. “It’s something we make inside ourselves.” Betsie died shortly thereafter. Corrie, the older of the two sisters, and the entire ten Boom family, staunch Dutch Reformed Christians, were involved in the resistance movement in World War 2.

Feeling that the Jews were God’s chosen people, the ten Boom family risked their lives saving them. Taking the Jews into their small apartment over the watch shop, the Dutch family would do everything to protect them: dye their hair, give them a change of clothes, and send them on their way with new documents. This family helped hundreds elude the Gestapo. Unfriendly neighbors, however, eventually noticed odd events at the shop and reported them.

Space doesn’t allow me to describe the inhumane conditions of Ravensbrück, where women were used for hideous medical experiments too dark to even mention. Starvation and brutality, however, took the major toll.

Now knowing the horrible conditions under which Betsie said those words, focus on what she said: “Happiness isn’t something that depends on our surroundings... It’s something we make inside ourselves.”

Can you find happiness or make it, regardless of where you are or how rough may be your road? What Betsie ten Boom described is akin to an inner joy that is impervious to adverse circumstances. The Bible calls it “the fruit of the Spirit,” the result of the indwelling presence of God the Holy Spirit.

How do you make happiness within? If you dissasociate happiness from having and can confine it to the realm of being, you then understand that it is a decision and an attitude, not an acquisition.

I will proclaim the decree of the Lord: He said to me, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.” Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Psalm 2:7-12