Happiness

In a recent Breakpoint commentary, Chuck Colson says, "Bad choices in all of the major areas of our lives - education, career, marriage, and more - can be traced back to mistaken beliefs about what will make us happy. The truth is that spending our whole lives chasing what we want is the best way not to find happiness. Look at the way America's founding fathers used the phrase the pursuit of happiness. We tend to interpret those words from the Declaration of Independence to mean that we're all entitled to do whatever we think will make us happy at any given moment-exactly the tendency that Gilbert is warning us against.

"But the founders were talking about something very different: Those words meant the freedom to make our best efforts toward living a virtuous life. They believed that this was the path toward true happiness. When we seek God's best instead of our own, we find a higher standard by which to make our decisions-a standard that doesn't change when our feelings do.

"As C. S. Lewis put it, 'You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.'"