Christian, how can you be happier?

In a comprehensive new study of happiness for the everyday Christian, Andrew Wilson weaves Biblical, theological, philosophical, psychological, and sociological methods to answer six major questions about human flourishing in our broken world. In these two extracts, he explores what joy is, and how time can affect our happiness levels.

Human beings have complex emotional lives, and it is very common for us to experience (for example) deep happiness and shallow unhappiness at the same time.

Yesterday, I came home to discover that our kitchen was freakishly cold and the heating was not working. I pressed buttons. Nothing happened. I asked everyone in the family if they had fiddled with the unit. Nobody had. I rang a helpline to see if there was an easy fix. There wasn’t. I expostulated in frustration, lamented my lack of technical ability, complained that things like this always happen at the coldest point of the winter, went in search of suitable screwdrivers, expostulated in frustration again, and eventually found the source of the problem: a fuse unit that had turned to charcoal. I huffed and puffed about the expense and inconvenience of having to call an electrician but eventually came to terms with the reality (which [my wife] Rachel had been pointing out for some time) that I was getting unduly worked up about an ordinary problem and I needed to get a bit of perspective.

We have a running joke in our family about situations like this. If I am getting needlessly negative about something trivial – which I admit has happened on occasions – Rachel will put on her most Eeyoreish voice and say, “I’m Andrew. I’ve been working all day in a fulfilling job with fun people, doing things I enjoy. I’ve just come home to my beautiful wife and three beautiful children. God loves me, my family love me, and I couldn’t be more grumpy about it.” Normally it takes only one or two sentences before I see the funny side of my overreaction and start laughing. Because of course she is right: I am only superficially miserable, whereas I am substantially happy. My gloom is shallow but my joy is deep.

The tragedy is that the opposite can also be true. The world is full of people who show all the superficial signs of happiness – Instagram shows them constantly smiling, laughing, dancing, eating and drinking in the sunshine with their arms draped around beautiful people – but who wrestle daily with broken relationships, fraught mental health, and existential despair. We can all think of friends whose public effervescence masks a private desperation and glamorous celebrities who have committed suicide. It is possible to be trivially happy yet substantially sad.

That, I think, is what people are trying to say when they draw a sharp distinction between happiness and joy. Personally I think that is an unhelpful (and unbiblical) way of saying it – not least because Scripture talks about enjoying, delighting in, rejoicing before, being gladdened by, being happy in, and taking pleasure in God, who is the deepest source of happiness there is. But nobody can deny that the distinction between shallow and deep forms of happiness – and our ability to experience one without the other – is a common human experience. Most of us would also recognise that the deep version knocks the shallow version into a cocked hat.

To illustrate the point, consider the ocean. As I write this I am sitting in a café on a beach in southern England on a bright January day, looking at a massive sparkling expanse of blue. On the surface, the waves are coming straight toward me from east to west, cresting and foaming slightly as they approach the shore. At a deeper level, though, I know that appearances are deceptive; the sea is actually moving very slowly and slightly away from me at the moment, because the tide is going out rather than coming in. And at a deeper level still, I know it is not even moving from east to west, but the exact opposite, because the Gulf Stream sends us water from the Caribbean. Depending on which level I am thinking about, the ocean is moving in three different directions at once. But the deepest one matters the most. The trajectory of the waves on a particular day do not make any real difference to my life. Most of the time the tides don’t either, although they might if I were planning a morning paddleboarding or an afternoon on the beach with the children. But the deep ocean currents have an enormous impact, making it warm and balmy in England today while my friends on the Atlantic coast of North America, who live several hundred miles closer to the equator than I do, are buried in ten feet of snow. So although the ocean is moving in three different directions, the one that counts is the deepest one. Ask any Canadian.

Emotions are like oceans. What happens on the surface is immediate and visible, and it is the main thing we will bear in mind when considering whether to take the children swimming or go surfing. But our long-term wellbeing is a product of deeper forces that we might not be able to see, or articulate, or even understand. In the language of the apostles, it is possible – and we might even say normal – for disciples to be grieved for a while by many kinds of trials, yet filled with joy unspeakable and filled with glory (1 Peter 1v6–9). It is possible to experience surface waves of transient laughter, and tides of melancholy and depression dragging us away from the shore, and deep ocean currents of warming and everlasting joy in Christ, all at once. It is possible and often necessary to endure short-term surface unhappiness for the sake of long-term deep satisfaction; this was frequently my experience writing this book (and it may even be yours reading it). It is possible, as Paul was, to be “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Cor.6v10). The day is approaching when the waves, the tides, and the ocean currents will all pull in the same direction; and we will laugh on the surface as we rejoice in the deep, and all manner of things will be well. But not yet. [From pages 32–35 of Chapter 2, Seven Flavours of Happiness – What Joy Is]

Our happiness changes over time because we do. Enjoyment fluctuates according to the time of day, the day of the week, the week of the month, the month of the year. It changes with the seasons. It evolves from year to year and from decade to decade, as things that used to make us happy no longer do and things we used to find mind numbing become sources of refreshment and delight. It changes with our age and stage of life, for a variety of contextual, chronological, and chemical reasons. If we take the really long view, it also changes according to whether or not we have died yet.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my own life.

All things being equal, I am at my happiest between seven and eleven in the morning. My energy levels are high, the day ahead is full of possibilities, I am motivated and eager to get started, and I am refreshed both spiritually (because I have my devotional time in the morning) and physically (having slept, showered, shaved, put on clean clothes, and had breakfast). At nine thirty, coffee in hand and laptop open, challenges feel like possibilities, and the world looks bright.

Six hours later, the picture is different. By mid-afternoon I feel drowsier, scratchier, less fresh, and less motivated. Ideas are slow in coming. Possibilities feel like challenges. Five o’clock comes with a shadow. I even smell worse than I did in the morning. When the children come home from school, I notice that they are facing the same energy dip as me but with thirty years less practice in how to cope with it. This can generate conflict, and by six, I often feel like it will be an achievement to get to seven thirty at all.

Happily, over the next hour and a half, something mysterious happens. My happiness starts to pick up again. I feel a sense of achievement in my work and enjoyment of my family. The evening meal feels like a destination rather than (like lunch) a waystation: an opportunity to look back on the day and spend time with people I love. Excitement and anticipation come back, often about something quite trivial, like the TV show we’re watching or the next chapter in the book I’m reading. Usually I finish the day looking forward to tomorrow. The week, like the day, has its ups and downs according to the balance of work, family, church, rest, and play. This is God’s idea, stretching right back to creation. There is meant to be a distinction between work and rest, farming and feasting, striving and Sabbath, even if it is a distinction that faces constant attack by push email, shift work, and the dreaded A to Z of Apple and Zoom. The end of the week is supposed to feel different from the beginning. For most of us, it does. The odds are that your enjoyment has a weekly ebb and flow to it, whether it follows the classic pattern from Monday blues to TGI Friday, or a horseshoe shape with highs at both ends and a trough in the middle, or whatever it is. Happiness waxes and wanes with time.

More significant still, at least in my own life, is the time of year. Much of that is geographic. I live on a windswept and often rainy island in the North Atlantic, a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, where it is dark for sixteen hours a day in the middle of winter and grey for many of the remaining eight. I don’t really mind that in December, because of the sparkle and coziness of Christmas. But by February the dull skies and the drizzle are starting to really cheese me off. I want to go for a walk without a thick coat and hat. I want to be in my office at noon without the lights and the radiators needing to be on. I want everyone to stop sneezing, sniffling, missing days of school, and saying that they feel a bit sick. I want to look in the mirror without seeing a pale, washed out face peering back at me. I want to sit outside in a pub garden with my friends, and I want leaves on the trees and horses in the fields when I do. If you run into me in early March, you will encounter a man who bears a striking resemblance to an emperor penguin: hunkered down and hanging in there, hopefully, but weary, cold, white, and desperate for the return of the birds and the bright.

And then suddenly it is Easter. The fields are covered in flocks and flowers, and vitality is spilling out everywhere. The scarves and hot water bottles go back in the cupboard. Out come the sunscreen and the flipflops, the kids’ bikes and the lawnmower. Neighbours start having conversations in the street again. The blossom, the resurrection liturgy, the freshly cut grass, and the hot cross buns all tell the same story at once: Jesus has gone through death into life, and so has creation, and so have we. Within a few short weeks the woods are carpeted with bluebells, and then come the rhododendrons and the swallows, the lifeguards on the beach, and the cricketers on the green. Words that have been hibernating – picnic, shorts, cider, beach, barbecue, raspberries – reappear. The days and weeks fly past. I feel hopeful and excitable without much explanation, simply because of the weather. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.

Your patterns of life will be different. You might be an owl rather than a lark, a person whose enjoyment peaks in the evening or even the afternoon. You may find weekends harder than work days, for any number of reasons. For plenty of readers, the daily or weekly cycle will be nowhere near as important as the monthly one, which has the power to make even the simplest day feel like swimming uphill. If you live in Australia or southern Africa, your annual rhythm may be the mirror image of mine; if you are in Scandinavia or Canada, it might be an exaggerated version; if you live in the tropics, it may be shaped by the rains rather than the temperature; and if you’re from the American southwest, then all this talk of “seasons” may sound like a foreign language. But however you experience the turning of days, your happiness is shaped by what time it is. [From pages 65–69 of Chapter 4, Happiness and Time – When We Delight]

Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever by Andrew Wilson was published by Crossway (ISBN 978 1 433 599 965) on 18 August. See the review of Happiness here.