5 Step New Year's Resolution Thermometer - how healthy are they? are we?

Here's a great quote for New Year's I came across yesterday:

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

Mark Twain

A little depressing, but how true. January 1st we make a firm decision, on the 2nd we're already having second thoughts. On the 3rd, third thoughts, and by the 4th, we've forgotten.

So how healthy are they? Are they going to make us happier, better? Or not? 

Happy, happy - what is happiness?

Are you happy? Really happy? We desperately want to be and are constantly looking for things to make us happy!

We have a kind of endless thirst, a bottomless pit in our souls for happiness! We try to throw everything we have at it, but nothing seems to quench it. Pleasure, money, success, even human friendships. It seems like we always want more to be happy. But it isn’t that direction at all.

College Party to Indian Mission - Francis Xavier

Francis had it all. Rich Spanish parents. He was bright, good looking, and popular. He was making the most of the college experience at the University of Paris - interested more in the right clothes, the right parties than anything else.

Everything was great when suddenly his roommate started acting strange. Peter was a good friend, and they got along well. He studied more and was a little more serious.

An Idea

Me in front of Westminster

I walked into the huge stone vaulted ceiling, and it seemed like I was stepping back in time. Hard to believe what this hall had seen in the previous centuries, but my mind went back to November 14, 1581. Edmund Campion stood his ground as he was convicted for treason. But in his own words, “The plain reason of our standing here is religion and not treason.”

Edmund Campion was an incredible Catholic, Christian, but above all, he was an incredible man. We need figures like this today. So often we look to musicians, athletes, or movie stars that aren’t even worth our admiration.

But I can hear the words of another man also spoken in England echoing in my ears:

When I invite you to become saints, I am asking you not to be content with second best. Having money makes it possible to be generous and to do good in the world, but on its own, it is not enough to make us happy. 

Happiness is something we all want, but one of the great tragedies in this world is that so many people never find it, because they look for it in the wrong places.

The key to it is very simple – true happiness is to be found in God. We need to have the courage to place our deepest hopes in God alone, not in money, in a career, in worldly success, or in our relationships with others, but in God. 

God wants your friendship. And once you enter into friendship with God, everything in your life begins to change. (17 September 2011)

Benedict XVI said this to the youth on September 17, 2010. What the world needs today are men and saints! What we need are men and saints! This might sound crazy, but this is what we need to think about, talk about and live out if we are going to be happy.