More thoughts about how joy works:

This is a two-part post. Click here to read part one.

Last time we ended on a question:

Do you think God loving us means He wants us to be happy now? Does He care about our immediate, present happiness, or just the happiness we will feel when we return to Him after this earthly journey?

I've thought a lot about this question over the course of the last couple of months. As I've been pondering it, my thoughts have been led to things that help me better understand God's love. What ideas are you led to as you think about this? Some of my ideas are:

1. Learn more about God's plan for His children. For me, this is best done in the temple. Here, we learn more about the direct result of God's love for us: His PLAN for us to improve in this life and ultimately return to Him. It is His plan for our ultimate happiness. There is a reason we feel good when we worship there, and I'm starting to think that's exactly it.
2. Study the scriptures looking for examples and teachings of the Plan of Salvation.
3. Pray. There is something about prayer that opens my heart to feel God's love for me, and the reassurance that comes from that, especially when life feels really difficult.
4. Help others. In my first post about this, I mentioned a talk from General Conference by D. Todd Christofferson. Another thing he spoke of in his talk was how joy comes when we help show God's love to others. 

Christofferson told the story of a woman, named Joanne, who cared for her husband who was in an accident and was wheelchair-bound for most of their married life. Joanne said that while she was his caregiver, her heart was light. This made me wonder: how could a light heart be the result of such a challenging circumstance? Another question I considered at this point was:

What are the things that make my heart heavy?

How can the potential answers to the other happiness-related questions we've talked about so far help me heart be lighter?

As I thought about Joanne's story and how it applies to me, I wondered what it means for how God helps us. Is His influence, felt through the Spirit, only there to help us help others? What about when I personally need help from Him? Must we hope someone else will follow a prompting to help us individually, rather than receive a blessing or help straight from God? 

I've heard many times that the way God answers prayers is often through the people around us. But thinking that the Spirit doesn't help me directly doesn't sit right with me. The thought makes me disappointed. When I realized it makes me disappointed, I asked myself why I feel that way about it.

...maybe because my brain and heart expect to be helped in specific ways. We're not always conscious of it, but we tend to have pre-defined expectations and ideas for what we want things like answers to prayers, comfort, and help to look like. And we might feel like God isn't helping us if those expectations aren't met.

A couple of weeks ago in a church meeting, something one brother shared made me think about this. He talked about how he and his wife are trying to teach their baby how to fall asleep on her own. (Maybe this stuck out to me because I definitely know how that goes!) This brother talked about how they've been thinking about how their daughter must feel when she discovers she's in her bed instead of in mommy's or daddy's arms. She must feel alone. She must feel abandoned. She might even feel cold, helpless, and overall sad. When we think about this when it comes to babies, we might think it's silly because we know the baby is safe. Mom and dad are right on the other room, and if anything bad were to happen they would be there in a flash. We know this, but the baby doesn't.

This is probably similar to how our relationship with God looks sometimes. All we see is our life, which could be compared to a baby's crib. God knows how to make sure we're safe, and He's always close, kinda like the baby's parents in the other room. Sometimes we just have a hard time remembering He's there. We want His help in a certain way, and usually we want it immediately.

This connects to the next topic I felt I should share. I said in the first post about this that I would talk about two topics. Two topics that I believe go hand-in-hand. The first, which we've spent a lot of time on thus far, has been on how the Gospel of Jesus Christ helps us be happy. The second topic is emotional independence. I think the brother's thoughts about sleep training is a good example of how these topics are connected. Sleep training teaches a baby to independently sleep. God's training for us (you could call it "life training,") helps us independently...life. :)

Now don't get me wrong, we definitely need God in our lives, just like a baby still needs her parents even when she starts to learn things for herself, like sleep. But maybe the way we think we need God could be adjusted. What would it look like to assess the way we expect help to come, and then adjust it? Would we be more satisfied with the way things are? Would we find it easier to be happy?

I mentioned earlier that we each tend to have ways we expect to be helped and comforted, and that we are usually disappointed when these expectations are not met. Sometimes the emotion is actually stronger than disappointment; it may be loneliness, helplessness, sadness, resentment, or a variety of other hard things to deal with feeling. So what if we assessed those expectations? What if we asked ourselves what other ways we can accept help from God (or, for that matter, from others around us)?

Thinking about it this way came from a podcast I recently started listening to. The podcast is called Live from Love and it's by certified life&marriage coach Amanda Louder. It has helped me a lot as I've been dealing with difficult emotions and thoughts about myself, mostly surrounding what we've been talking about in these two posts.

This is Amanda.
@amandaloudercoaching on Instagram

Her podcast really is amazing. I listen to it on Spotify, but I know it's also available on iTunes. Here is her website if you're interested in more information.

One of the main things she talks about is how we each have what she calls a "manual" for how we'd like to be treated and how we expect people to act around us, particularly our spouses. We have a manual for our parents, our co-workers, our spouses, our kids, other drivers on the road, people in line at the grocery, etc. And we are disappointed when people don't follow that manual. Much of her podcast centers around how to be intentional as we think about these manuals, and one thing she talked about really struck me. She said: don't have any expectations of your spouse, or any other loved one. Fulfill your own needs, and just have your loved ones there for you to love.

I'll repeat that.

Don't have expectations of your loved ones. 

Fulfill your own needs, and just have your loved ones there for you to love.

At first this seemed totally unrealistic and dumb to me. No expectations? None? Isn't it okay for me to want to be loved, comforted, and cared for in a certain way? But then she goes on to talk about how the things we feel (loved, comforted, happy, at peace, etc.) all come from our own thoughts. They come from how we perceive things. Our emotions come from how we choose to react to our thoughts, and the idea that we can learn how to control those thoughts, and the emotions that follow them, is actually very empowering.

So, what would happen if we thought differently when it comes to our expectations of God, others, and ourselves? How does that apply to the happiness theme we've been focusing on here? Let's take a good look at what our expectations are of:

• How we feel happy
• How God answers our prayers and pleas for help
• How we feel God's love

Think about how you expect things to look, and then consider how you feel about those expectations. Do you like them? What could you change about them? What would that change look like for you? What if that statement about expectations also applied to God (i.e. don't have any expectations of God. Fulfill your own needs, and just have God there for you to love)? Something I've discovered while thinking and praying about all of these things is that the Lord's help comes in the form of me changing, not from my circumstance getting better or from others being better to me.

What do you think? I love thinking about this stuff, so if you want to keep talking about it with me please know I do NOT think it's weird for you to contact me with questions or comments about what I've shared here. Feel free to contact me and let's keep pondering together.

I invite you to include your Heavenly Father as you ponder and discover things about His love for you, His plan for you, your emotions and expectations, and ultimately how you can look for Christ's example as you decide how to be. 

He loves you.

Thank you for thinking about this with me.