Happiness is not real unless…

My son lives outside Cleveland, Ohio. He is a Rays fan, and he was home alone last night, his wife having to work. So, he sat down to watch the game, previously recorded.

In the third inning, the Rays blew the game wide open with a 3-run homer by B. J. Upton. Matthew lept up and shouted, and then realized that there was no one to be excited with. So, he sat back down, called me, to see where I was in the game (which I, too, had recorded). We compared locations, and he told me to call him back when I was at the top of the 3rd inning, so we could then watch it ‘together’.

After Upton’s home run, I called him and we gloated together, as we did the rest of the game, now and then touching base on the phone for a virtual ‘high five’.

This is a somewhat trivial but revealing example of what Chris McCandless painfully and desperately learned in the recent movie Into the Wild. Toward the end of that film, McCandless, alone by choice and trapped by weather in wilderness Alaska scrawls into his journal something like this: “Happiness is not real unless shared.”

In the movie that is a poignant and powerful message: we are created for community. Happiness is not real unless it is shared. When discovering something great and wonderful, its power and joy is dulled if there is no one with whom to share it.

When our team plasters the Red Sox with two back to back 9-run games, it is wonderful. But it is made all the more wonderful when that is shared.

And to realize that there is a God who has loved us and drawn us to himself is special. But we must worship together to celebrate Him, because our happiness is simply not real unless it is shared.