We all have the desire to be happy.  The founders of this country knew this and acknowledged it in our founding documents saying, “… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  They sought to protect these God-given rights.  When we think about tomorrow it is this pursuit that engages our minds in various and indirect ways.  We want the things that are associated with happiness with the expectation that happiness will be found therein.  We want someone to love and be loved.  We want a career, skill, trade, business, or livelihood that will provide some measure of financial provision and security.  We may want a family, children or at least see ourselves as being parents one day.  Generally, this distinguishes the hopes and dreams of men and women, not in the subject, but in the specificity and intensity of the hope.  Perhaps it is true with other dreams also.  Women seem to be more intensely concerned with security than men.  Men seem more likely to get absorbed in their work.  These are not hard and fast rules that apply to everyone individually, and this is not about gender differences.  Each of us has a longing for happiness and the vision, plan, story or formula that describes that state for which we seek is different, but the fundamental object is very consistent.

Is this yearning simply a chemical response like moving into the shade when the sun becomes too hot and intense upon our skin?  Are our hopes and dreams like gravitational forces that draw us like water following the path of least resistance until it reaches the sea?  How free are we to choose our own paths to happiness or construct the narrative that tells our story of a happy life?  As Americans we are given many tools and much assistance in this endeavor of pursuing happiness.  Our founders recognition and protection of it seems to have fashioned entire industries, even a society that collectively pursues it.

The “it” of “happiness” can not be bought anymore than love can; which the Beatles popularized with the lyrics, “Money can’t by me love.”  Our literature is highlighted with stories of love lost and found.  Every movie has a love scene even though in most movies today love can only be depicted as a fleeting and meaningless sex act.  The founding fathers saw there could be no guarantee of happiness, but rather, only the pursuit thereof.  I believe they did this in recognition of the fallen human nature of mankind.  We are very imperfect and prone to evil, this is clear from history and most evident in the tyranny of dictators and captive societies.  The framers of our country sought to limit government in order that liberty may be protected and thrive.  Moreover, they first sought to protect the freedom of speech and religion.

It is in God that we find peace and rest.  God is love and has shown us what love is.  Hope is a person, Yeshua Messiah.  When we accept the truth of God’s existence that surrounds us in this wondrous creation in which He placed us, then the light of His truth is revealed in His Son Yeshua Messiah.  All that we are and ever hope to be are found in the fact that God made us as we are to have relationship with Him first, then with others around us. This is accomplished through the love that He pours out in our hearts by Holy Spirit. (Rom.5: 5).  The longing for happiness is our innermost being yearning for God.

Until we submit to His existence and lordship, we remain in our broken state of reality. In and by God’s grace salvation comes only through His Son Yeshua Messiah.  He is the Supreme person for which everything was made and holds together. (Col. 1: 16-17).  As such, and finally, He is the fulfillment of all your hopes and dreams.  Keep hoping, dreaming, yearning, and pursuing happiness because in Yeshua, God wants to give you life and more than you can possibly imagine. (Luke 12:32; Eph. 3:20; Matt. 19: 29).