Because I’m Happy

by Lisa Rector

When I was a young single adult, I had a friend who constantly told me I wasn’t happy. This shocked me. I couldn’t comprehend, for one, how he could determine this in me, and two, I didn’t see how I wasn’t happy. Maybe, because I was a big flirt, he thought I was seeking for happiness in all the wrong places. The truth was, when I was single, I was living it up and enjoying life. I had so many pressures and stressors while I went through nursing school that on the weekends, I was a hopeless flirtatious bomb.

I didn’t care.

Then I married. Then I had children. I became a hostage to hormones running amuck in my body. I hated my daughter for the first six months of her life. I resented my husband for some unknown reason. All because chemicals told me I was unhappy. Until I experienced seven years in a mix of chemical and postpartum depression, I didn’t know what happiness truly was.

From the darkest abyss and wishing for death, to indescribable, the-only-way-to-understand-would-be-to-plug-your-spirit-into-mine-with-some-sort-of-mind-meld happiness. It’s not something you can express. When you’re happy, you feel it throughout your whole soul.

What’s my secret? I can explain it in a few phrases that will make you want to throw your tablet across the room, because you will say, “Duh. I’ve heard all this, but it’s not working for me.” Well, until the moment when you experience the change from unhappiness to bliss, you won’t really know what it means to be inexplicably happy.

Ready to throw your device?

The Light of Christ

The Atonement

The Plan of Salvation

Effort

Enjoy the moment

Find your purpose

Let it go

Count your blessings

If my God is with me, whom then shall I fear?

The formula is different for every single soul. But I will tell you. Because of the atonement, I conquered chemical depression. Because of my testimony in the Savior, I live each day with hope and peace. Because of the atonement, I am clean and light and free. Because I work my butt off every day to be still and let peace and beauty soak through me, I can breathe. I don’t fear evil. I rejoice in all that is good in life. I have purpose, even if it is only to get up every morning and hug my daughters. Even if it is just to lay beside my snoring husband and listen to his heartbeat.

My soul—my heart and spirit—want to rupture on occasion. The feeling is so hard to contain.

My daughters scream in embarrassment when I crank the music loud and dance in my kitchen, when I roll the window down and wave at everyone who drives by. When I make silly faces or when I start in on a lecture about how amazing the sunrise looks or how the rain makes everything look like a fairyland. Or how the squirrels and the rabbits bounce through the yard. I tell them to look at every good thing, look at every small moment, SEE what God has given us.

My only regret is that not everyone sees and not everyone feels this happiness.

The world would be so different if they did.

“Men are that they might have joy.” Be in that joy.

Now watch this.