My happiness is seeing you happy. There is nothing that my heart longs for, more than the sentinel longs for the morning light, than to see you smile. This is the fundamental truth that flows in the veins of everything that is good and Christian. It is a truth that God himself has revealed and lived in

This is the fundamental truth that flows in the veins of everything that is good and Christian. It is a truth that God himself has revealed and lived in the first person.

So many human realities have been underrated, if not outright attacked, when this truth is ignored or denied. How many young men and women these days, for example, look at marriage and family life as something miserable, almost a sort of second level living in which fun, adventure, and happiness are dimmed to a dull glow for the rest of their lives. True happiness, they say, comes in the form of success, traveling, fleeting moments of adrenaline. Waking up next to the same person day after day, cleaning, working, and serving, that is not a life worth living.

Yet, as I grow, more and more of my friends are getting married and it is impressive to see the changes. The sense of adventure and happiness isn’t dimmed, it is rather interiorized, consolidated, and lived on a deeper level. The heartbeat on a roller coaster may be higher than that of a father soothing his baby to sleep, but I can tell you that he has experienced a happiness that he wouldn’t trade for the whole world. It isn’t poetry, it isn’t rhetoric.

It is anthropology. Man’s heart was made not only for self-sustainment but also for self-donation. In giving we receive, in giving we live, in loving we experience love in a way that leaves us smiling for eternity.

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