The Joy of Christ: Part 1

We kind of have a running joke in my family that has to do with one of the questions that Mom would always ask us. As teenagers, this question usually caused us to cringe and feel a little awkward, because we were never really sure how to answer it. We would usually try to brush it off with a terse, general answer and try to move on to another subject. The question that caused such pain to us was this:

"Are you happy?"

For some reason I never wanted to answer that question. I didn't want to analyze myself, and I never really knew what to say. But this question has been on my mind frequently lately, and it has led me into other questions such as these:

What is happiness? How do we cultivate it? Where does it come from? How do we know when we are happy and when we aren't? How do we help others become happy? How do we maintain happiness?

All these questions and many more have made me want to study this topic in depth, so I have decided to have a continuous blog that deals with the subject of happiness. Hopefully as I do this, I will understand a little bit more about it and finally be able to answer my mother's question: Are you happy?