January 10, My conception of love and hapiness

*I've fallen rather behind, but I'm also in no hurry.

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'
-C.S. Lewis

Don't our children desire most that we "make them happy?" Don't you wish most often of your spouse that he or she would "make you happy?" Aren't we inclined most often to pray to God for happiness sake? Maybe I'm wrong in this but I think it's pretty simple human nature to desire almost above all else, happiness. I don't have any doubt in my mind that God wants us to be happy; surely He desires that we be happy but that certainly isn't His main objective. He desires the best for us. Is being happy at all times and at any cost the best? Nope.

It's okay to not be happy sometimes. When walking through the refiners fire I doubt there's a good deal of happiness welling up inside of the vessel being refined.

I love the end of this quote, "my conception of love needs correction." I'm fully a culprit to this. I'm an enabler. I absolutely desire to make others happy and almost always at my own expense. My conception of love needs correction. Happiness is not the main objective in love. If my 'love' towards another is enabling them happiness but hurting them in some other way I'm not entirely loving them. "My conception of love needs correction." Lord I pray you show me truth.

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness - the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to love in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.
-C.S. Lewis
The Business of Heaven