Put Money In Its Place

There is a promise perpetuated throughout our society that wealth, possessions and experiences are necessary to have fulfillment and satisfaction in life.

Do you find this promise to ring true in your own life? How long does a new purchase or vacation provide a feeling of excitement and enjoyment before it wears off and we left looking for something new again?

The pursuit of happiness and peace in our lives is natural, it’s what we were made for. The trick is finding the way that leads to that destination. Life is full of people with agendas and motives that are not in your best interest, pulling you away from the real happiness you’re after. Products and services are marketed to us endlessly every day, trying to convince us how much we need them in our lives. In truth, the majority of products don’t exist because they are needed, they exist because people are willing to pay for them, even if its to their own detriment.

This is not to say every product and experience is bad, but rather that looking to these things to bring us true satisfaction and happiness is asking too much of something that was primarily designed for the purpose of generating profit for a company.

There is another way to look for the happiness were after, and the endless sea of goods and services all around us actually gives us a clue about how to find it. Take a car for example. It is designed to run on a specific fuel, whether that be gasoline, electric or diesel. If you took your car to a mechanic and were told that you need to put orange juice in your gas tank, or plug your charging cable into a pile of dirt, you would immediately know that to be a foolish idea. Why? Because you know that’s not what your car was designed for.

Similarly, using your smartphone to hammer nails, or your TV as a trampoline would be doing something contrary to the designer’s intent for those products, and not surprisingly would result in two broken items in your home.

Do we share a similarity with these products? Were we designed for specific purposes, and does deviating from those purposes cause us to break too?

In some areas the answer is clear. If we eat nothing but chocolate cake for a month straight, our bodies will be giving us several symptoms telling us that we are doing something we weren’t designed for. If you take a hot pan out of the oven with your bare hand, the pain response and damage to your skin is a sign that you have exceeded the temperature limits of what your hands were designed for.

Just like with a car or smartphone, the key to our health and happiness is to do the things we were intended for. It’s evident that there are at least physical things we were and were not designed for. What about mental and emotional things? How do we learn what to look for to have health and happiness in those areas, so we can fully live the way we were designed to?

We do it the same way we do with any other product we are trying to fully understand, by reading the instruction manual that the product designer wrote.

When it comes to humans, our Designer did not leave us empty handed to try and figure out how to live life. In addition to clues He built into His creation as mentioned earlier, He left us with a book full of truth and wisdom to teach us, his Holy Bible.