Download The Sacrament of Happy: What a Smiling God Brings to a Wounded World AudioBook Free
Imagine hearing your physician let you know that potato chips and queso contain much more healthy benefits than kale and quinoa. Or starting an envelope that looks like just another costs, and unfolding instead an official doc declaring you the sole beneficiary of an anonymous billionaire's real estate. In her new booklet, The Sacrament of Happy, Lisa Harper unveils a likewise extravagant, unexpected wonder, declaring that delight - just plain sense happy - is a present from God that you can unashamedly enjoy. Using the twin hats of seminarian and belly-laughing adoptive mother, Harper provides a warm, vignette style built upon sturdy theological scaffolding. She observes, for example, that God's selection of wording for the first verse of the first psalm (a phrase often translated as "blessed") actually means happy - among the many biblical reasons for dismantling the old-school proven fact that joy, not delight, is the truly religious one of the Religious family. In reality, they're more like fraternal twins than faraway cousins, meaning we as Christ-followers are not called to jettison delight - just like a no-longer-needed set of religious floaties - once we learn to swim in the profound waters of intimacy with God. Beyond only a circumstances-based, up-and-down emotion, happiness comes from a profound conviction in the unmitigated goodness in our Creator-Redeemer, freeing us to feel and exhibit genuine joy, fulfillment, and contentment, regardless of personal or global tumult. The author's personal storyline includes such delight killers as erotic abuse, the deaths of near family members, a heartbreaking failed adoption, followed by the arrival of an adopted little princess from Haiti who's HIV-positive. Yet she creates on themes or templates like:
- The lost sacrament of laughter
- Does indeed happy have a personality type?
- Tuning out the Pharisees who try to mute your delight in the context of religious maturity
