a child's eyes: instead of pursuing happiness

When I first met the man I would one day marry, I feared I was too young to settle down. There was so much that I had yet not done. He met me at a time in my life when my future stretched grandly in front of me. I had visions of living abroad, learning new languages, traveling the world on a budget, meeting interesting foreigners, and practicing a life of abandon that both honored God and gave me global experiences.

It was still in the early days of the relationship, however, when I wondered if, despite the many unfinished goals on my list, God might be intentionally pairing us. He had put a man in front of me who shared so many of my dreams. Travel and global adventures being a few of them.

In our first years of marriage, he challenged my ideas in the best of ways and took me to places I had never heard of before. We honeymooned on the Cook Islands, got our scuba certificates on the island of Utila (Honduras), served on medical mission teams in rural El Salvador, and in between jobs spent 3 months backpacking through Europe sleeping on trains and in some of the dumpiest hotels imaginable.

That was all before children entered the picture. Something happens to those dreams of wild and unconventional adventures when our families start to grow. We begin to pursue stability and consistency, schedules and routines, dependability and sleep. Mostly we pursue all things related to sleep. Stability is a necessity of survival during the little years.

Last week, my husband and I celebrated 13 years of marriage. I like this photo from our date night out because we look happy. And we are happy... mostly. Happiness doesn't happen on its own though.

In fact, we have spent the majority of the past year in conversations together processing some of the deeper issues of what this life should be all about. We find ourselves in a place with much of that dearly sought stability... with a house, and a big yard, and two cars, and three kids, and a good school, and nice friends, and a Bible-teaching church. This is what it looks like to live the quintessential American dream. We can feel immensely grateful for the blessings of this season in our life, at the same time as we wrestle with that niggling feeling in our hearts that this isn't the end of the story for us. Because never have we been fooled into thinking that pursuing the American dream is what makes "happy".

There was that time in my youth when I saw myself as an adventurous go-getter, but someone much more subdued has emerged out of me in these recent years of raising small children. Anything outside of our routine, that doesn't involve staying at home, with access to my car, and the closet full of entertaining toys for the kids, and the familiarity of my community just sounds really hard to me.

Perhaps it is for this reason that my personal journey this year has been to surrender more. That journey, and my husband's own mid-life "reflection", as we have come to call it, is leading us to let go of some of our so called stability in order to make room for the next thing God might have for us. We are being challenged not to fall into the trap of pursuing the things that deceptively lure us to a place we never intended to end up. Anything other than God that begins to master or motivate us can become a false promise to perceived happiness.

Our trust and hope cannot rest in the pursuit of stability, or the pursuit of empty promises, or even in the pursuit of happiness itself. More accurately, happiness comes as a kind of by-product to the pursuit of God's best. When we are becoming who God uniquely and individually created us to be, fulfilling our purpose in Him, then sometimes along the way we are gifted with that wonderfully warm feeling called "happy". The hard days still exist, but perhaps happiness finds us a little more often when the dreams we are pursuing mostly belong to God.

My husband continues to challenge and stretch my ideas, and he gets the major credit for what we are about to do next. I am not ready to reveal here on this public space quite yet, but keep checking back! Thirteen years into our marriage, another great adventure awaits. In fact, after thirteen years, the adventures just keep getting better... stay tuned for more details!

In the meantime, here are some photos of our past weekend/anniversary/family trip to a place that gives me a glimpse into God's incredible imagination - Yosemite National Park.