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Welcome to another episode of Jubilee Life Coaches Blog. I'm Coach Brian. I have been a pastor for over 30 years, and lately I have been working as a Christian life coach. I bring a balance of Christian counseling and reformed theology to our worldview. So today's episode asks a question that sounds simple and turns out to run deep, which is is happiness something we find, something we make, or something we're given? Is happiness something that we find, we make, or we're given? Now we come at it through an unlikely door, a well known talk about how to explain a hard idea. It opens onto the heart and onto the gospel and so forth. So please stay with me. A Harvard psychologist named Dan Gilbert once had 21 minutes on a stage to explain one very hard idea. And here is the interesting part. He did not begin by explaining, he began by making his audience wonder. He asked the question, Why was nature so eager to give each of us such a big brain? A small curiosity stirs and a curious mind opens. Now that is a moment every coach learns to trust. We cannot pour understanding into anyone. We can only ask a good question and wait for something to open from the inside of our clients. So stay curious with me for a few minutes because Gilbert is building towards something that touches all of us. Now he starts with the brain. One thing our minds do is run what he calls an experience simulator. Like a pilot rehearsing in a flight simulator, we can live in experience in our heads before we ever try it. So for example, you already know that you do not want liver and onion ice cream. You do not have to make a batch. You taste it in your mind and say no thanks. So this simulator has a flaw though, however, Gilbert calls it impact bias. Impact bias. Now we're sure the next thing will make us or break us. The promotion, the move, the outcome that we keep bracing for, and then it arrives, and it moves us far less and for far less time than we predicted. We keep misreading where our happiness actually lives. Then comes his big idea. Human beings have a kind of psychological immune system. Just as the body fights off infection, the mind quietly protects our peace by changing how we see the world we're in. When we get what we wanted, we feel what Gilbert calls natural happiness. When we do not, the mind builds something he calls synthetic happiness. And he insists the two are equally real. Now, I want to say plainly that there is something true and good here, that is, the human mind really does have a remarkable power to find its footing again after a fall. Scripture does not deny this. The Apostle Paul said he had learned to be content in any situation, whether brought low or living in plenty. But here is where the story turns, and it turns on a man Gilbert himself quotes. Now to show that this machinery belongs to all of us, Gilbert reaches back to an English physician from the seventeenth century. Imagine that, named Thomas Brown. Now in 1642, Brown wrote, I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. Gilbert reads that as evidence of the machine that we each carry, and he is right, as far as it goes. But one thing is missing. Thomas Brown was a Christian. In that very same book, his confidence does not rest on his own inner machinery. No, it rests on the providence of God. A few lines later he prays, Dispose of me according to the wisdom of thy pleasure, O Lord. Thy will be done, though in my own undoing. Now do you hear the difference? Brown knew what the explanation leaves out. The machinery is real, but it is held in a hand. A happiness that only rearranges our feelings is a gift. A peace rooted in the God who holds us is deeper still. Now this is a quiet question underneath the whole talk, and that is, is joy something we find? Something we make or something we're given? Now think for a moment how many parts of you are running that simulator all day long. A planner part is rehearsing tomorrow, a protector part bracing for the worst, a quieter part working hard to keep you feeling okay. And none of these parts are bad. Each one is trying to help, but not one of them is meant to run your whole house. And the steadying center you're looking for is not, in the end, a self you reach on your own. It is God at work within you. As Paul wrote, it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Peace is not manufactured from inside us. No, it is received from the one who is inside of us. There is one more thing in that talk worth carrying home. Gilbert's explanation works because he remembers what it feels like not to know. Now, most of us forget. Teachers call it the curse of knowledge. Once we understand something, we can hardly recall not understanding it. But there is one who never forgets what it is like to be us. He did not explain us from a distance. No, he came near. Scripture says we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet he is without sin. God is a teacher who stooped all the way down to our level, and more than a teacher, he became one of us to save us. So the good news is not something that we finally find. No, it is not something we manage to make. It is given to us a son, a savior, a counselor in person. So if you are worn out today from bracing for the next hard thing or from remaking a piece that keeps thinning, please hear this. You can set down the pressure to predict your future. You can set down the burden of producing your own peace, and the joy you keep trying to find and have managed to make is finally a gift held out to you. So before you go, please sit with a question or two this week. When you imagine the next thing you're hoping for or dreading, what does your inner simulator tell you it will mean? And what might still be true even if that prediction is off? And and here's one more. Where in your life are you remaking a piece that keeps needing to be remade? And what would change if that piece were received rather than produced? You will find the rest of these questions and the sources behind today's reflection in my blog, JubileeCoach.com, a life blog section. Don't forget, we're freed in Christ to live. Now let us live to free others. This is Jubilee Coach once again. Until next time, Godspeed.