How Does the Good Life Feel?

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

  How does the good life feel? It's such an important question because we, in our current era, care very much about our feelings, what we feel matters. In fact, we feel some sense of obligation to go along with our feelings because otherwise we're inauthentic. So the question for us this week is, how does the good life feel?

Does it feel easy and happy and comfortable? Certainly, that's marketed to us plenty, but I think all of us know that while there's some appeal to that, it's great for a vacation and actual life that way doesn't always feel good. Maybe the way it feels is sort of in a cool, peaceful way, like Buddhism in the sense that you become a person who's disconnected from your cravings in the world. And you see those cravings as the cause of suffering.

So rather than feel angry or scared or sad, you see those as something that observed and you're just curious. You ask yourself, well, why do I feel angry about that? Or why do I feel sad? And your journey is sort of a non-engagement journey. And so that's how it feels.

Maybe for you, the good life, the way it feels is that you have access to things. You have the ability to attain what you want. That's certainly some of the American dream of being able to attain all the right goods and things, and school and accolades, and so maybe that's how it feels. Well, I think that each of those has some merit to them, those philosophies. I think that what Christ offers us in terms of how the good life feels is a little bit different because what we believe is that in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, that the good life has been revealed, and in that good life, we are taught how it might feel to us.

There are three things that I want to highlight. The way the good life feels is delight, not happiness or pleasure, but delight. Additionally, there's a place for sorrow. And lastly, the way it will feel is that there will be some sense of sacrifice and satisfaction, Paul writing from this perspective that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ has changed everything says to the Romans, the church at Rome. Hey, what I want you to do is I want you to let love be genuine. I want you to lean into the good. I want you to offer forgiveness to others. I want you to overcome evil, not with evil, but with good. I want you to rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering. These are the ways that we are supposed to live, but underneath them, it gives us a taste or a picture of how life might feel.

So this idea of rejoicing with those who rejoice and letting love be genuine and leaning into the good is where I think we get this idea that, the good life should feel like delight.

And the reason I use delight is that in our world, a lot of times we're chasing pleasure or happiness. We're looking for that dopamine hit from our social media posts being liked or someone messaging us back. Or that addictive little hit of taste we get from the Dorito dust as we're watching our favorite team win.

We just sort of are going after things and hope that we get that little boost. But delight is something all together different. It's the transcendent experience of joy that you get maybe when you hold your child for the first time or watch kids explore and find joy in play. It's that time in which you're in a conversation with a friend and it feels like it has no beginning and no end.

That's how the good life feels. It's not something that we can purchase. It's not something that we can control. We don't attain that delight by separating ourselves from the world, but rather it's entering fully in to the goodness of people and beauty and wonder. And in the midst of that, that's where we experience delight.

Now, we can't manufacture it. It's not something that you can just create, but it is something you can pay attention to and it can be discovered and encountered as you go. I think that's the importance of the practice of gratitude because as we practice gratitude, it helps us to have eyes to see the delight that could be before us.

So maybe because of that, we stop and we see the sky and the sunset in a different kind of way. We give thanks and appreciate what it's like to come home and be with our loved one. We find extra humor in the silly things that go on at work and in school and our neighborhood. And so the good life, the way it feels is it feels like we get a sense of delight, that transcendent joy that we experience.

The second thing that we should experience, I think in the good life is sorrow. And that's a funny thing because we have a tendency to want things to either be easy or we avoid pain and sadness. In fact, we sometimes we think if it makes me feel sad or it is painful, then it must not be good. But in fact, I think what we see, as Paul says, to rejoice in hope to be patient in suffering, he's acknowledging that in this world there will be feelings of sadness, of sorrow, of wrestle.

But that that is not the end of the story. That there's a future coming in which there's resurrection. And so for now, the good life will be an experience in which we have sorrow over the gap between what is and what could be. You know, I love the illustration in the movie Inside Out. Because Joy is convinced that sadness is going to ruin everything.

And so what she does is she banishes sadness from the internal workings of this little girl. And what we see throughout the movie is as sadness is banished, the little girl loses herself. She shuts down. And so it's this reminder to us that the good life has a place for being sad and mad. And we've seen this in the person of Christ, the person of Christ as God comes into the world and weeps as people mourn and weeps over the loss, he gets angry at the way that people are dehumanizing others. And so for you and I, the good life is going to involve some sorrow, some sadness, some wrestle in the midst of this life, and I think that sometimes we're afraid of it and so we deny it.

But if we allow it to be something that we can greet, that we can say, Hey, this is in fact part of the good life, then it gives us a better chance to accept it and experience it, even though we don't always love being sad and mad.

So my question to you is, how are you currently having a sense of hopeful sorrow, allowing the brokenness to engage you as it does not run from it, but engage it? Because I think that that's the place in which empathy begins. And so as we experience that sorrow, that sadness, but with a sense of hope, it drives us to love and care and mercy. And so think through like how are you allowing that in, because that, that sense of sadness can propel you to care for a loved one.

That sense of anger can help you stand up for injustice. And so the good life is something in which we experience delight, but we also experience a sense of sorrow between what is and what could be.

Lastly, the good life gives us feelings of sacrifice and satisfaction. You know, we have a tendency towards this idea that things should be easy, and if they're hard, we should figure out how to make them easy.

But when you think about something that's really rich, like marriage or raising children, creating community, building and improving society, it takes a lot of work. And that work requires sacrifice. And without that sacrifice in that work, you never attain the satisfaction. And so when Paul says things like, Hey, live peaceably with others to whatever degree you can, don't, return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good, forgive those who persecute you.

Those are actions that will require sacrifice. But as you see the renewal and restoration that can come from allowing good to overcome evil for the reconciliation, that can come by offering forgiveness, you'll experience that sense of satisfaction. And so again, we want to change our perspective. We don't want to see the good life as something that is absent of sacrifice, but rather we recognize that through sacrifice, we get to experience satisfaction for the way things are restored, are built, are created.

And so for you, as you head off this week and you think about, okay, well how does the good life feel? Maybe what you want to do is you want to pay attention to the moments in which you feel to light and you say, oh, that's the good life. Where you feel sorrow between the gap of what is and what should be.

You say, oh, that's the good life. And then finally you're like, Hey, here's how I'm working. Here's how I'm sacrificing, and here's how I've seen growth and change and the satisfaction that goes with that. Oh, that's the good life. And knowing that those things are rich and full and good, and they're part of the kingdom of God.

I hope you have a great week and I look forward to continuing this series with you next time. Take care now.