Where To Find Your Happy Place

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One of the most meaningful things we can do with our lives is to search for the place where all the joy comes from.

Consider for a moment your earliest memory of deep and heartfelt happiness. You may remember a birthday party, or a holiday, or a game. Perhaps you had a new experience you’ve never forgotten, or you laughed until your sides ached; maybe it was a gift, or a sense of achievement, or a view, or a hug.

Now ask, Why do experiences of happiness like that exist? What is it about the world that means delight, enjoyment, and pleasure are found within it? It wouldn’t seem to be a necessary feature of a physical world. Gladness isn’t something you’d expect rocks or oak trees to experience, and plenty of animals survive perfectly well without laughing or rejoicing or gazing in wonder at the mountains. So why are we not among them? Where does happiness come from?

Problem of Superfluous Happiness

One common answer is that we experience enjoyment because it helps us to survive. Food is enjoyable because we need to eat, comfortable clothes and furniture are enjoyable because we need shelter and rest, sex is enjoyable because we need to reproduce, friendship is enjoyable because we need to collaborate to survive, and so forth.

That makes sense as far as it goes. Lots of delights in this world are indeed useful or even vital to us in some way, and you can see why the release of “happy hormones” when we encounter them would be to our advantage.

The problem is that many other delights—including many of my favorites (and probably yours)—serve no useful function whatsoever. Take flowers: Few things in creation have the capacity to lift my spirits like a forest covered in bluebells, or a field of bright yellow sunflowers, or the aroma of lavender. I recently asked my wife what her happy place was, and she reminded me of a garden of water lilies we visited in southern France.

Even small children can be captivated by the fragrance of a rose, the curvature and alignment of its petals, the intensity of its color. But why? We don’t eat them. (Many of the most beautiful flowering plants are indigestible or even poisonous to us.) We don’t use them for shelter or clothing. We don’t need them for reproduction or bonding with other humans. They’re utterly useless to us (a phenomenon that puzzled Charles Darwin). The joy they generate isn’t a product of their utility but of something deeper and more mysterious.

This becomes even clearer when we think about comparative beauty. Why are daffodils so much more beautiful than potatoes, when they’re incalculably less beneficial? Why do we enjoy the song of blackbirds but not the snuffling of pigs, when from a survival perspective it should be the other way around? Why do we derive so much more pleasure from the appearance of horses than donkeys, tigers than toads, birds of paradise than birds of poultry? Why are some things so much funnier than others? Why is anything funny at all?

We’re dealing here with what I like to call the problem of superfluous happiness. (It’s the mirror image of the much more famous problem of evil, which contemporary people are generally more aware of.) Put simply, there’s a lot more joy in this world than there needs to be. Yes, some sources of enjoyment are useful for our survival, and we could dismiss those as mere evolutionary adaptations if we chose to. But many aren’t.

There’s a lot more joy in this world than there needs to be.

The most committed materialists still delight in shapes and sounds, color palettes and proportions, voices and faces, jokes and ideas and poetry and harmony, which have nothing to do with whether they or their offspring live or die, and everything to do with a felicity and wonder that seem baked into the world. That felicity isn’t necessary or even useful—but there it is anyway, hiding in plain sight and inviting us to ask where it comes from, and where it’s particularly present or tangible, and (if we feel adventurous) where we might find more of it.

Three-Dimensional Happiness

The ancient Hebrews had a thorough and (literally) three-dimensional answer to that question. It shaped the way they understood all space: their land, their capital city, their temple, their camp in the wilderness, their origin story in the garden, and the cosmos as a whole. At the center of all those places was the presence of God.

Start with humanity’s first happy place, the garden of Eden, where humans lived in perfect friendship with God and experienced bounty and blessing. The word “Eden” means “pleasure,” and everything about the garden suggests unfettered delight. Of course, we all know what happened next. But the connection between abundance, joy, and God’s presence didn’t disappear with the fall.

From the moment Israel became a nation, she was organized around God’s dwelling place, with the tribes setting up camp on the outside with the tabernacle in the center (Num. 2). The closer you got to the center, the happier––and holier––things became. Unclean activities took place outside the camp; ordinary, common activities took place within it; and worship and sacrifice happened in the very center.

The tabernacle was filled with Edenic imagery (cherubim, gold, fragrant incense, a treelike lampstand, flowers, fruit, water, an eastern entrance) to remind Israel of it daily. The tabernacle’s design proclaimed the truth that you’re never closer to “Eden,” to pleasure, than when you’re close to God, the source of all delight.

That connection between God’s dwelling place and the world’s happiness would become much clearer with the building of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The psalms are gushing with references to joy in God’s house (Pss. 36:7–9; 84:1–2, 10), and even its restoration after the exile fills the Israelites with joy (126:1–2).

But it’s Solomon’s father, David, who goes even further. He declares that beyond dwelling in any physical structure, being in God’s presence and the joy it brings is the only thing he wants in life: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple” (27:4). God’s presence is so delightful that when you experience it, you don’t want anything else.

Joy to the World

Then, Jesus comes. Almost immediately, some people begin to realize that God’s dwelling place and the location of happiness have been concentrated from a place into a person.

John’s Gospel is particularly clear on this. God’s glory tent is now the person of the Lord Jesus, where light shines in the darkness and the Word becomes flesh (John 1:14). Jesus is where God’s presence is made manifest on earth, and all the symbolism of the temple is fulfilled in him. From the glory cloud at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry (2:11; 12:41) to the two angelic guardians at the end of it (20:12), it’s unmistakable that this man, not a building or a city, is where heaven now meets earth.

Then, Jesus comes. God’s dwelling place and the location of happiness have been concentrated from a place into a person.

Happiness’s location has been concentrated into the person of Christ. We might be able to guess that from the moment Jesus appears at a wedding and provides all the wine they could ever drink (2:1–12). Further clues to the location of joy emerge as Jesus generates abundance and surplus wherever he goes.

But it doesn’t become explicit until the night before Jesus is arrested, when he finally gives the disciples the reason for all he’s been teaching. “These things I have spoken to you,” he explains, “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (15:11).

This isn’t just an aspiration; it’s a promise. It isn’t merely that Jesus wants his disciples to be filled with the joy that comes from him. Because of the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in his name, Jesus is guaranteeing his disciples a joy that will transcend all the sorrow they’ve known. In the next chapter, he continues with one of the most comforting statements you’ll find anywhere: “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22, emphasis added).

It’s only logical: If God’s presence is a place of “fullness of joy” (Ps. 16:11), and if Jesus is the One in whom we find God’s presence perfectly dwelling (John 1:14), then wherever Jesus is—whether in his physical body, in the bread and wine, or moving among his people by his Holy Spirit—we’ll find our joy being full.

That’s why the fruit of the Spirit is joy (Gal. 5:22). That’s why the disciples were so exuberant on the day of Pentecost that people thought they were drunk (Acts 2:13). That’s why the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation causes people to “rejoice and exult” so loudly that it sounds like an army, a waterfall, and a thunderstorm all at once (Rev. 19:6–7). Wherever there is Jesus, there is joy.

Presence of Happiness

This means the location of joy is primarily about presence, not absence. Happy places have to do with who or what is there, rather than who or what isn’t there.

Many people today see things the other way round. Happiness is found by removing the sources of sadness. You achieve peace by resolving conflict; you find wellness by banishing anxiety; you experience bliss by taking away stress; you have a holiday by stopping work; you reach nirvana, enlightenment, or paradise by banishing suffering, ignorance, or the body. Joy is located where certain things are not. Even the language we use to describe happy places and experiences—“vacation,” “retreat,” “break,” “hideaway,” “escape,” “getting away from it all”—reveals the extent to which we see the location of happiness in essentially negative terms.

There’s truth in this, of course. When creation is renewed at the very end of the biblical story, the new heavens and new earth are described with a series of delightful denials, as a place with no more tears, no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain, no more thirst, and no more evil (Rev. 21:1–8). But crucially, the reason that those things aren’t there is that God himself is there, wiping away the tears and remaking the world. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man,” says the One seated on the throne. “He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them” (21:3). The absence of grief is grounded in God’s presence.

Happy places have to do with who or what is there, rather than who or what isn’t there.

In the same way, joy in this world is located wherever God is present, in Christ by his Spirit, rather than wherever painful things are absent. It could be in a Galilean boat battered by the waves; it could be in the sorrow and confusion of an upper-room farewell, in the injustice of a Jerusalem kangaroo court, in the stocks of a Philippian jail; it could be in the isolation of exile on the island of Patmos. As sad as the circumstances may be, if God is present then delight is available. Joy is found through presence, not just absence. Happiness is more about the presence of Christ than the absence of crisis.

That’s why Paul, to take an obvious example, could talk about being “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10) and demonstrate the truth of it by writing history’s most joyful letter from one of history’s most miserable places. Few environments can have been more miserable than an ancient Roman jail. Yet his prison letter to the church in Philippi bubbles up with joy because Jesus is there too: joy in prayer (1:4), preaching (v. 18), life (vv. 24–25) or death (vv. 18–21), humility (2:1–3), sacrifice (vv. 17–18), hearing their news (v. 19), the Philippians (4:1) and their concern for him (v. 10), and the Lord above all (3:1; 4:4).

If happiness required the absence of all sources of pain, then the rejoicing we find in Philippians—and in the Psalms, and in Scripture as a whole—would be impossible. Our only hope of being able to “rejoice always,” as Paul urges us to in 1 Thessalonians 5:16, is found in the effervescent ever-presence of Father, Son, and Spirit.