Heavenly Father wants us to be happy.
“The intent of the Father’s great plan of happiness is your happiness, right here, right now, and in the eternities.” (Elder Patrick Kearon, ‘God’s Intent is to Bring You Home,’ Gen Conf, April 2024)
We forget sometimes that His plan is ‘of happiness’ and therefore provides the way to that sometimes elusive state.
He wants to show us what happiness really is, and how to get there. So He doesn’t just want us to ‘be happy’. He wants us to know happiness and choose it.
But many, many other voices in the world try to convince us that happiness lies elsewhere. They are loud and insistent. And the short-term evidence seems to support some of their claims.
He is a God of love and goodness and desires for us to find pleasure and enjoyment in many things the world has to offer. But never at the cost of forgetting the true path of greatest, lasting happiness. Because happiness cannot survive eternal loss and cannot remain fully without our becoming more like Him.
His plan for our happiness includes growth and sacrifice and obedience (often without knowing why); letting go of self and seeking to help others; faith and effort and repentance and humble listening and following.
It takes faith to trust in the Father’s way of happiness, and intentional enduring in that way in spite of bad days, setbacks and real affliction.
It takes being different sometimes; moving forward without perfect knowledge; ‘heeding not’ the mocking and philosophy and popular opinions of the worldly voices.
It takes remembering what He ultimately wants to offer us and what the world ultimately cannot offer.
‘…increasing in holiness [is] the only path to happiness…Only by faith in Jesus Christ, continuing repentance, and keeping covenants are we able to claim the lasting happiness we all yearn to experience and retain.’ (Pres. Henry B. Eyring, ‘Holiness and the Plan of Happiness,’ Gen Conf, October 2019)
His plan of happiness is the path to happiness.
Happiness is, ultimately, a life like His.
But it doesn’t wait for that far away time. It is found along the way in our striving to walk His path.
