Early in August I sat with a question that’s simple to ask and much harder to answer honestly: is it joy you want, or is it happiness?
You can have happiness without joy. You can have joy without happiness. But the version worth chasing is the one where you have both, joy first, happiness following.
Money can buy happiness. Money cannot buy joy. Happiness is derived from something you can touch, see or reach. But joy comes from within, it lives somewhere money can’t reach.
- A feeling tied to what you own or possess—like a thing you purchase or acquire.
- Transactional by nature; money can buy it directly.
- Tethered entirely to external circumstances and shifting situations.
- A deep way of being full regardless of circumstance.
- Lives in a space that money and endless striving simply cannot reach.
- Sourced entirely from within; not a formula for feeling good.
I know this one from the inside. I once sold my blog to buy something I was certain would make me happy, a high-ticket course on making money, and It did make me happy.
There’s a real feeling in owning something expensive.
But it didn’t bring joy, and I spent the aftermath trying to chase that missing joy through more spending, until I’d lavished everything and ended up addicted to the chase itself.
I once asked myself, if I had a hundred thousand dollars today, what would I stop doing, and what would I start? What I found out is that I didn’t need the hundred thousand before I could start living that way.
What I thought I needed to be happy was never actually the thing standing between me and it.
True happiness, I’ve come to believe, is found in others. True joy is found in yourself. And both are choices.
You can have joy by genuinely doing what you love without needing to monetize it.
Not Playing God
A few days later I found myself circling a different but related idea: don’t play God. We play God the moment we convince ourselves we can control the outcome of tomorrow. We map out our plans, carry the burden of the unknown, of tomorrow, and exhaust ourselves trying to fix everything.
No matter how meticulously we plan, only God knows if those plans will work or how they will unfold. He is the creator and the one who has the power to control all situations and all things. He knows the unknown. He is the provider, the giver, the builder, the protector, the source, the sufficient one, the Prince of Peace, and the only one who is truly dependable.
As human beings, we have limitations by nature, and until we accept that, we’ll always be worrying, chaotic, and short on joy. Our duty is to do our absolute best with what we have right in front of us, and then to acknowledge our limitations by completely trusting and depending on Him.
When you stop playing God, you start seeing your flaws and limitations clearly
Whatever happens, God allows it, even the things we caused ourselves. He’s the one who demotes and promotes, who gives the power to build wealth, who controls situations and natural law and can open doors no one else can touch.
This brings me to a recent realization about light and darkness. In the dark, there is no worry, no shame, and no striving because there is nothing to see—but there is also no direction.
The moment we let the light in, we expose our errors and the exhausting facades we put up to look strong. We realize we’ve been striving just to survive and impress, moving without a destination.
The irony is we can’t see any of that until we choose to shine light toward it. Night is coming when no one will be able to do anything at all.
What I Was Actually Doing With Scripture
That clarity about light led somewhere I didn’t expect. I hadn’t actually been studying scripture. I’d been using the Bible the way you’d use a dictionary, reaching for it to back up a thought I already had.
I spent years able to sound like I understood scripture without ever sitting down to actually know it.
I didn’t have a reading plan or have verses memorized and I wanted to change that. I want to grow my spiritual muscles the same way and at the same time I grow physical muscles. Since my routine was already crowded in the mornings, I moved both into the evening, between five and nine.
It has always been my long term dream to grow spiritually and I’ve finally engineered a system to help me do just that.
Early in the month I’d started a daily devotional series, posting a short reflection every morning, and I stayed committed to it through the end of August.
But before I started, I didn’t know I had it in me to sustain something like that. My real purpose, the fight I’ve been in my whole life, is with escapism, and I don’t always know what tomorrow’s devotion will be about. I don’t map the week in advance.
Instead of trying to plan everything from day one, I’ve accepted my own limitation and handed the rest to God. I’m not required to see far. I just need to ask for the day’s bread. For as long as this daily bread keeps being provided, I keep feeding whoever is hungry for it.
That is why I am taking this devotion out to Substack next—as a shared table for anyone else hungry for the word of God.
What ties all of this together, joy over happiness, refusing to play God, studying instead of quoting, showing up daily without a script, is the same discovery underneath:
Faith that performs well in public is not the same as faith that’s actually been studied and lived with in private.
August was the month I stopped mistaking the sound of faith for the practice of it.
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