The purpose of life or a house full of chairs

Image via Wikipedia

All of us want to become happy and there is nothing wrong about that. What we need to understand is that nobody can be happy by being alone, by just taking care of yourself. You cannot make yourself happy. You are happy when you are being loved. Other people also feel happy when they are being loved. Therefore, my happiness depends on whether others are loving me.

To understand how we can become happy, we must take the viewpoint of God who created us. God created us to have objects to whom God could give His love. God wants us to become happy. That is also the reason that all of us carry this desire in us to want to become happy.

We are creations in the likeness of God and because God’s only desire is to make us happy, we should also only have the desire to make God happy and to make others happy. You cannot force someone else to love you. The more you try to do this, the more that this other person will dislike you.

All what we can do in life is to begin giving love. Even then, we cannot be sure that our love is returned to us right away. But if we continue to give out love, then bit by bit there will come people who will return this love to us.

Surely, when we give love to God and make God happy by doing God’s will, we will receive God’s love in return.

When you want to make someone else happy, then you have to be able to give something. A little baby can give its smile but it cannot yet make something. Children want to learn to make something so they can make the parents happy.

Suppose that a friend of mine is a cabinet maker who wants to give something to me and he gives me a chair for my birthday. He can only do this because he has learned to make chairs. Suppose i get a chair from him on my birthday, and because he did not develop himself in the year after it, i get another chair on my next birthday. At the end of my life i have a house full with chairs because he never developed himself any further and he can only give chairs.

The example shows us clearly that when the purpose of life is to become happy by giving joy to others, we have to develop ourselves. By developing ourselves we also develop our ability to give love. And in order to develop ourselves we need to receive training.

The purpose of life is that we give out love and make others happy. Our own joy comes from that. To learn to give out more love, we need daily training and development. In that way, there comes about the build-up of a good world.

We should be careful that we are not going to wait for love to come to us. Love does never come in that way. Each of us has to start giving out love. It is only then that love will come back to us.

Don’t become like a machine that just does what it is being asked. When people do that, they begin to count how much food and energy and money were required to get enough profit. This is not the way to live. In that way we never will get happy.

When we go out selling a product, like for example in fundraising, the purpose is that we learn to give love in each of those short relations that we have with people. Some people are used to get love only by asking for it. Now we must learn to give out love, first only in a rather simple way by giving love to the people while selling a product on the street or from door to door. That is the central meaning of the training of going out to sell a product.

From notes of my speech on December 12, 2001