To be honest, I’m not really happy right now. But don’t worry, I’m actually pretty happy about that…
We have a foster son who we’ve decided to adopt. We love him, but he is awful. In the gene pool is a delightful cocktail of bipolar and schizophrenic tendencies. On top of that, he has trauma from his family dropping him off at social services and leaving him when they couldn’t handle him anymore.
For example, whatever we serve him at supper, even if he asked for it, he now says he wants something else. If you see us wrestling to control him at a restaurant, this is probably why. Also, he hits his wonderful, caring teacher at school and throws things at the world’s most patient principal. When we tell him to get off his tablet, he screams and stomps, slamming doors. And when we discipline him for that, he defecates or urinates somewhere in the house.
Don’t worry – eventually the smell tips us off as to where the deed was done.
Some medication has helped, but never for very long. The conflict is relentless. Lots of caring people and relatives have witnessed the chaos we’re dealing with, and said nice things like “you know, you really have to think of what’s best for your family. Why don’t you just turn him back over to Family Services and let them put him someplace that can help him?”
What they don’t realize is, for most kids like our foster son, there is no such place. Most places we’ve looked into are for mentally challenged kids (our boy is actually pretty smart) or for kids who’ve acted out in truly violent ways to harm others (ours might leave a bruise, but that’s usually it). Chaos and conflict are what he does, often 12 hours a day.
Most likely, Family Services would just end up dumping him on another family who would then repeat the cycle of trying to help him with few results. Or he’d end up with a family who was just fostering for some extra cash (which by the way, we do not receive since we didn’t have time to go through the foster care certification classes when we learned about his need of a family).
So we are making the conscious choice to welcome this chaos into our home. While we continue to try and find medication that will help our boy deal with his demons, we also continue to plan to adopt him. And we realize by doing that we will probably now deal with a lifetime of getting him re-evaluated when this medication stops working, because they all eventually do. We’ll repeat this until he’s grown, hoping that along the way we can keep him from hurting himself too badly or harming anyone else.
Will we be happy dealing with that until we’re in our 70s? No, we will not. It will be a continual trial.
However, we are happy knowing it’s OK we won’t be “happy”. We’ll be unhappy, but we’ll have our boy.
Hands down, my most popular article on my website is “When God Wants You Unhappy”. I can usually count on it getting several reads per day, without fail. Folks on the internet Google some phrase like, “Doesn’t God want me to be happy?” and my article pops up saying the opposite.
The idea that God is unconcerned with our happiness seems counterintuitive to most people. They have decided somewhere along the way that God’s chief goal is our happiness and personal fulfillment. They post endlessly self-help memes on Facebook about “finding their bliss” and how it’s time to drop someone from their life because “they just don’t make them happy anymore”.
But the big surprise is that in all the things God really did promise us, He never talked about happiness. Not the kind of conflict-free, self-absorbed love fest we think life should be.
Conversely, God talks a lot about purpose…HIS purpose, and about us getting in on that. “Seek ye FIRST the Kingdom of God and HIS righteousness” He proclaimed, and said all this other stuff we’re worried about will fall into place on its own.
But happiness? No. Trust me – chaos is going to come. One day, you’re going to lose that job, get that test back from the doctor, or lose that loved one. It’s inevitable.
The only difference with us is we are choosing part of our chaos. We know for the next 10 years what it will be. Which I guess is some kind of odd comfort.
Those illusions about happiness are the exact reason why so many needs in our world go unmet. Spiritually wounded people wander through our lives unattended, mostly because we believers are too self-obsessed to notice them. We shake our heads and say, “How sad”, never dreaming God might expect us to do something about it.
Before you start, please don’t tell me what martyrs my wife and I are for doing all this. Frankly, it will be all I can do not to roll my eyes. That’s because everybody should be doing something hard that shakes their life to pieces, in order to be Jesus to someone in this broken, twisted world. We’re certainly not the only ones doing thins like this. Most of the adoptive and foster parents I’ve met are Christians. So many people are doing harder things than us, but not enough people are doing anything at all.
As I’m reading some of this back now, I realize it may sound a bit judgy. I just came back from an appointment where a friend was talking about the ordeal of trying to prop up their depressive spouse who’s had years of health problems. Honestly, they’ve got enough to say grace over without trying to change the world yet. And some of my “meme-posting friends” probably do not have the emotional strength to help anyone else now – it’s all they can do just to prop themselves up and keep going. But our goal has to be to eventually get past ourselves and do the work of Christ in this world.
I know that some will say I’m just virtue-signaling here. Maybe you think I sound a bit self-righteous. But maybe the fact that you are not doing anything important that makes you unhappy means this little piece is supposed to be your wake up call.
No, Virginia, God does not care about your happiness. He cares about your life having Godly purpose and meaning, changing the world for the better. Hopefully this happens before you waste it all and die chasing after some sad illusion of happiness He never promised you in the first place.
As the song says (almost), “don’t worry. Just be unhappy”. Trust me, you’ll be fine, and the world will be a better place for it.
