Christians think they get happiness. If I believe in God, I'll always be happy. I just have to choose to believe and all will be well. Sadness results from not believing, which can be fixed by choosing to believe again.
Not only does that theory have strong detractors within the biblical witness (Hello, Psalms!) but it sets up a deeply disturbing equation: faith = happiness. The more faith you have, the happier you'll be.
A recent TED talk suggests that we've got our understanding of happiness all sorts of backwards. Shawn Achor is a positive psychologist at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. During a recent conference he shared insights from his research on happiness in the workplace. As Achor sees it, the working world has a backwards understanding of happiness, too. Most of the people he meets suggest that their employees would be happier if they were only to work harder and earn more money for the company.
But his findings suggest an opposite link- happiness is the cause (NOT the result) of hard work. And that's not all: happy employees are more intelligent, more creative, better at securing jobs, better at keeping jobs, show superior productivity, are more resilient, burnout less, turnover less, and have higher energy levels.
How big are the differences? Achor measured brain waves and performance measures for workers in multiple professions and found shocking differences between happy and unhappy workers. As a whole, happy workers are 31% more productive than their psychologically neutral or unhappy peers. Happy salesmen were 37% more likely to land the sale. My favorite, and the most disturbing, statistic: happy doctors are 19% faster and more accurate with their diagnoses. (If we could make America's healthcare system 19% more efficient, imagine the change it would bring!)
The moral of Achor's story is that happiness precedes productivity. Finding the causes of happiness are trickier, but he has discovered this: 10% of a person's happiness can be determined by their external traits (years of education, income levels, etc) while 90% is determined by how your brain processes the world.
That's right, 90% of your happiness is dependent on the way your brain interacts with everything around you. This flies in the face of the American dream, which tells us that if you work hard, money and then happiness will come. Achor's research suggests that you can work as hard as you want, but without a particular positive neurological framework, you'll be mired in unhappiness mud till kingdom come.
This is the kind of science I love because it simply reinforces something Christians already knew to be true. Since the beginning of the church, life wasn't easy for followers of the Way. Persecution and torture became synonymous with discipleship through much of the first few centuries of the A.D/C.E. era. House churches were filled with the disabled, widows, lepers, the poor and many more of society's outcasts. Happiness defined by money or power was the antithesis of the Christian experience until the 5th century when Christianity became the religion of the empire.
But these martyrs of early Christendom didn't need position or power, because they had something much more powerful: hope. Hope defined the Christian experience then as it does now. Many preachers have come and gone that taught one form or another of the prosperity gospel (God wants you to be happy above all else). Yet every time these movements gained steam something happened to burst their bubble. Reality catches up with prosperity promises after time, as economic crises and man-made wars remind us that unadulterated happiness is not a virtue espoused anywhere in the Biblical canon.
But hope is. Praise the Lord, oh my soul. I trust in my hope and my salvation. Countless voices in Scripture speak of the hope we have in the God of Israel, the grace of Christ, and the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit. Christians know that happiness is fleeting, but hope springs eternal. The hope we hold onto, the good news of Jesus, may indeed lead to joy, but joy too is much different than happiness, because joy is a by-product of hope. Happiness may come and go, but we know that hope is the fire that feeds our lives. As my home church pastor said once, "Food is for the body what Hope is for the soul."
Achor found that he could rewire workers' brains to positive thinking in 21 days by having them do a few simple daily exercises:
Write down three things you're thankful for.
Journal.
Exercise.
Meditate.
Commit random acts of kindness (writing a letter to a mentor from sometime past in your life, etc).
What struck me is how those recommendations parallel common Christian practices, and so I rewrote them for our hopeful purposes:
Give thanks to God (at least in three ways) for his Triune goodness in our lives.
Write psalms to God- lament, praise, thanksgiving, hope. Keep a journal or diary, write a song or poem- God speaks every language we can throw at him.
Use the body God gave you for kingdom service!
Pray. When you're walking, sitting, or driving. Simply pray what's on your heart.
Commit random acts of kindness. In the church, we might call this "taking up your cross."
Whether it's these practices or others, find a way to practice hope. Live it, drink from the well-spring of life. And may the hope of salvation strengthen you for the future as you do every good work in the name of the One in whom we hope.
*You can watch Shawn Achor's 20-minute TED talk for free here.