Telling a Better Story by Josh Chatraw

Author:Josh Chatraw [Chatraw, Joshua D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Wallace observes that the utilitarian approach, which views the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain as the meaning to life, actually undermines true joy as it ignores what humans have basically always assumed: we are supposed to learn from pain. Pain, rather than being the root problem itself, is a symptom that something more foundational has gone wrong.

Third, Jesus taught that the only way to find true joy is to deny yourself. We were made to love God and to love others. Our design is patterned after the tripersonal self-giving nature of God himself. God is perfectly joyful because he lives to give of himself. The way to find ultimate joy, according to the Christian story, is to decenter ourselves and to step into relationship with this loving, personal God.

This is the “paradox of joy.” If you pursue happiness as an end in itself, you will spend your life trying to minimize self-sacrifice and pain by getting everything and everyone to rotate around you. Yet a self-centered life pushes against the very fabric of the universe. The more we demand to be in the center, the more we feel like we are losing control when things don’t respond to our wishes, which leads to frustration, anger, and a debilitating egotism. Self-absorption dehumanizes us, eventually leaving us bitter and alone, because we were made to turn outwardly rather than inwardly on ourselves. Hence Jesus’ command to pick up our cross and follow him is indeed a call to die, but it is also a call to live with the grain of the universe and discover true joy.

In summary, as we engage others, it’s important to understand that many now view the “good life” largely in terms of personally “feeling good” rather than “feeling bad,” and then assume that with the right psychological balancing and therapeutic practices, they can be happy. By comparing the modern story about happiness with the Christian story, we can invite others to consider which narrative actually fits.

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