There might be a cottage or a kitchen or your parent's house or a tire swing or a reading corner or a beach. Wherever it is, it stirs you to contentment and peace.
But what if that place was stripped away? What if your parents sold their house? What if the tire swing was cut down or the kitchen remodeled?
Happy places force us to ask ourselves: What really makes us happy?
And when you get down to it, it's not really any place that makes us happy.
It's the security of a place, the protection it seems to provide. It's the joy of it. It's the memories of happiness - I have the history of warm and fuzzies. It's the fun of it. It's the people there.
So many pieces conglomerate to create your happy place.
Ultimately, what makes us happy are the intangibles in life. Joy, safety, peace, love - and the people that manifest them.
But without the Creator of those good intangibles, we could never be truly happy. It is because our happiness is founded, rooted, grounded in God that we can ever taste happiness on this earth.
When you consider what makes you happy, the material often comes to mind - ice cream, movies, good books, pillows. But when you dig a little deeper, it is really the feelings, the emotions, the tastes these things evoke - the intangibles.
What really makes us happy? The things in life you can't measure. The things you can't necessarily hold in your hand or stuff in your pocket. These are the very things that shape our reality.
And these are the things endowed by the Giver of good gifts.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons and Tim Samoff.