NATIONAL CHAPLAIN'S MESSAGE
Infectious Happiness
I f I may turn your attention to the biblical Christian Paul in his happiness letter to the Christians in Philippi and us, Paul wrote infectious happiness is what we need during this critical period in our history. From the confines of a jail cell, Paul finds his new normal and the challenges Paul faced were viewed as seasons of happiness and opportunity. Paul eases our fears as he opens us up to the possibility of unexpected blessings and benefits this moment in our history brings and that lie in the future. Happiness is infectious according to Pauline thought. Paul must have been a Kappa man because he tells us that we begin to feel the joy ourselves that happiness brings. The Kappa strut and/ or stroll is a dance of distinction and an exclamation of Kappa delights and joys. It has a way of getting inside of us when we think of the happiness of crossing
the Burning Sands. Our happiness is not a word we can understand by looking it up in the dictionary. It is something more like an apprenticeship where one is required to be around someone else who has worked out years of devoted discipline. The evidence displayed and portrayed to us, by a Kappa Man's entire behavior, is what happiness is. Moments of verbal instruction will certainly occur, but mostly an apprentice acquires skills by daily and intimate association with a brother. An apprentice pick-up subdue but absolutely essential things such as timing and the rhythm and touch. When we read what Paul wrote to the Christians in the city of Philipi, we find ourselves in the company of just such a brother. Paul does not tell us that we can be happy, or how to be happy. He simply and unmistakably is happy. Little of his circumstances contribute to his joy. He wrote from a jail cell as
if it were his home, his work was under attack by his competitors who posed as his friends, and after twenty years or so of hard traveling in the service of Jesus, he was tired and would have what some relief. But circumstances, betrayals, pandemics, and pandemonium are inci- dental compared to the life of Jesus that Paul worked for and experienced from within. For it is a life that not only hap- pened at a certain point in history, but continues to happen, spilling out into the lives of those who receive him, and then continues. My choir sings, "this joy that I have, the world didn't give it to me! The world didn't give it! The world can't take it away!" And, every now and then, "I get joy when I think about what He's done for me! I get joy when I think about how He set me free! I get joy! I get joy! What He's done for me? I get joy! I get joy! That's how He set me free!
126 | SUMMER-FALL 2020 ♦ THE JOURNAL
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