Is John Maxwell Right?

"Happiness is a choice." Really? Is happiness an affair of the will? What about all those 1st world people who seem biologically predestined to be miserable?

Have you not encountered them? The people who hear Maxwell say this (or Peale or Ziglar or Osteen, etc.) then summon all their moral energy to choose happiness today. And then some event happens that is less than ideal, and in comes the acrid fog of unhappiness. So they summon more moral courage and try to stop it, but they never can. What if unhappiness just chooses some of us?

Of course after the futile strain that is their efforts to resist unhappiness, they are even more deeply affected by unhappiness, because now they are not only unhappy, but moral failures for their inability to resist it. They are not only unhappy, but they are bad people as well.

So they turn to drugs, exercise, a new job, food, something, anything, to rearrange the environment to make it happier. It never works. And when it doesn't work, they lash out at the things and people that fail them. Some of them are perceptive enough to know that they are the center of their misery and thus they lash out at themselves, perhaps even hurting themselves. But unless they have the strength of will (if we are to call it that) to end their own lives, this only compounds their unhappiness.

Some of these people have every blessing that can be expected in a sin-diseased and broken world. Some are rich and have loving families. Some are utterly surrounded by near pristine beauty, and yet they are miserable. (Contrast them with the untold millions of contented poor, or contented sufferers of all kinds...)

Perhaps the naturalist is right. Perhaps they are merely biologically predestined to be miserable. Perhaps they operate a broken machine; broken by no choice of their own, but only by the sheer cosmic genetic lottery. Perhaps they can manipulate this broken machine to alleviate some of the sadness, but perhaps then again they cannot. It may never work. Nature has made them a self-loathing and therefore self-serving and self-centered being. They were built by nature to be nothing more than a white hot center of nerves pulsing constantly with pain until death dissolves the pain.

In the meantime, after awhile anything that passes close to this tangle of nerves will itself be seared by it. If some human beings are like refreshing oases, where the pains and struggles of life may be soothed, these people become yet another source of the pains and struggles from which we all seek refuge. Thus no one really wants to be around them and they become isolated, which compounds their sadness, and compounded sadness becomes anger, which compounded becomes hatred, and after awhile this spiral downward becomes impossible to stop or even slow. Indeed after awhile these people are perpetually affected, intemperate, uneasy and angry, and they don't even know why anymore.

Of course as a Christian I believe there is a solution, but these people will never seek it; the solution must seek them. The solution is the cross of Jesus Christ. When Christ turns to a person in this condition and his transforming embrace is felt, then change can begin. Only the gospel can make men happy; not our feeble choices!