Do you feel guilty about being happy?

It doesn’t take much to increase your anxiety these days, especially if you’re already sensitive to it.

Look at the news for a just a few minutes, and you can easily feel a mix of sadness, anger, pain, resignation and fear. When you see everything that’s happening in the world, you might wonder what you can do about it in your small corner of the world. It feels like so much is out of our control.

Maybe you sometimes feel like whatever you do doesn’t matter since in the grand scheme of things, what does it really change? Maybe you focus on sharing your gifts with the world – but then you question how valuable those gifts really all when the world seems to be full of chaos.

Maybe you really enjoy what you do, but then you feel guilty about feeling that happiness when you know so many others are living in misery and fear.

Maybe you’re torn between just giving up and persisting since you know that while you can’t change everything you can do what you can, whether that’s sharing love with the people you come into contact with or helping people when and where you can.

Your feeling miserable or depriving yourself of true, meaningful joy won’t make anybody else’s life any better. To be clear, I’m talking about deep, meaningful joy – not momentary, quick fixes or “feels good in the moment” happiness. I’m talking about the kind of joy that can only come from feeling connected to your soul and living from your heart and into your potential and what you’re meant to do.

The song “The Change” by Garth Brooks really highlights this point (lyrics from http://www.azlyrics.com). Here is just a small part of it:

This heart / Still believes / That love and mercy still exist / While all the hatreds rage and so many say / That love is all but pointless in madness such as this / It’s like trying to stop a fire / With the moisture from a kiss

And I hear them saying you’ll never change things / And no matter what you do it’s still the same thing / But it’s not the world that I am changing / I do this so this world will know / That it will not change me

It doesn’t improve the world to give up and live a life of anger and pain. By all means, feel empathy, but don’t allow the suffering to make you give up on who you can be and what the world needs you to do. It may seem like a small spark of light in an ocean of darkness, but it is still light. It may seem like a small slice of love in a world filled with hate and anger, but it is still love. We may not be able to do everything, but we can do SOMEthing. We can pray. We can love. We can strengthen our relationships.

We can do our best.