Don't Worry; Be Happy

You know most of us probably have a bunch going on in life; we may feel stretched thin; even overwhelmed with work, Church, economic issues, friends, family…and the list goes on. As I was contemplating this an old song from the 80’s popped into my mind; Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

Now that’s a great title and I don’t know if you know this, but this song; released in 1988, was the first a cappella song ever to reach number one on the billboard hot 100. This song also garnered Grammys for Song of the Year, Record of the Year and best Male Pop Vocal. Pretty amazing and it made me wonder if there were more to the title; so I did a little Google on it and found it was actually a quote from India Mystic; Meher Baba. It was actually a paraphrase from a longer quote that said “Do your best. Then, don’t worry; be happy in my love.”

Great thought which brought to mind Philippians 4:4; Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again; rejoice! Another translations says it like this; I want you to be happy, always happy in the Lord; I repeat what I want is your happiness. Notice in both translations Paul tells us where we will find our happiness; “in the Lord”! So no matter what is going on in this life it is only when we are living with a strong faith in God; only when we grasp onto the radical nature of God’s grace and love through Christ that we find true happiness.

So Don’t Worry; Be Happy has a lot of truth (at least in the title) when we find that happiness in the Lord. Now doesn’t that sound great? But the skeptic in me just has to ask how do you find yourself in the Lord?

I recently read a short bio on a Christian Evangelist named George Mueller. We was born in 1805 and lived most of the 19th century; he witnessed the great awakening of 1859, he worked with D. L. Moody, he preached for Charles Spurgeon and he also was the director of Ashley Down orphanage in England which cared for over 10,000 orphans in his life. He also established 117 schools which offered Christian education to over 120,000 kids. As much as he had on his plate, as busy as he was; as much as he had on his mind, I think Mueller figured out how to be happy in the Lord.

Mueller said; “the first and great primary business to which I ought to attend every day, was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man may be nourished…I saw the most important thing I had to do was give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it.”

Amazing – to delight in God’s word; to let it nourish us, and to ensure there is relationship by meditation, contemplation and prayer so that in our busy, busy lives, in our state of being overwhelmed we can rejoice in the Lord, we can always be happy in the Lord; we can Don’t Worry; Be Happy!

Grace and Peace!