Popcorning

I learned something interesting about guinea pigs recently…when they are happy they jump! This behavior of theirs is called “popcorning.” I can just imagine a group of happy guinea pigs jumping around like little popcorn kernels.

I found this especially funny because two of my children do something similar when they are happy. My twelve-year-old has always been our “sugar monster.” Despite my best efforts at nutrition, the thing that makes her bounce up and down with sheer delight is anything sweet. This can be a dessert like cake or ice cream, but the treat that really gets her on her toes is jelly beans. If you want to see a twelve-year-old “popcorn” like a happy guinea pig just bring my daughter jelly beans!

With my other daughter, music is the source of her bounces and wiggles. For her whole eight years of life, whenever she hears music, she immediately starts moving. If she has the space, she breaks out in full on dancing! It is so joyful and full of life, that most of the time she gets those of us around her to join in.

It seems that children–and evidently guinea pigs–have joy built into them by God. For whatever reason (maybe a lot of reasons in some of our lives) our joy seems to grow less and less as we get older. We lose that spontaneous ability to laugh, jump, spin or “popcorn” our happy moments. It is partly the cares of this world and partly our ideas of how “grown-ups” should act. Even as followers of Jesus, we can have incorrect ideas about how we should experience joy or happiness.

For a long time, I had been taught that happiness was not something followers of Jesus should pursue. Rather, we should rely on an underlying joy to get us through tough circumstances. Oddly, this led to a lot of guilt on my part whenever I would experience happiness. I also tried to keep myself strictly contained, not “looking forward” to things or pursuing things that would give me what I was taught was “frivolous” happiness. I am blessed to have a mentor who has shown me that this type of thinking is not only incorrect, but that the Bible talks about joy over and over. Many of these verses are about the joy we have in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

God created all of our emotions, happiness and joy included. I now believe that He does want us to experience these feelings, especially when we think about Him. In fact, sometimes I feel so happy about my relationship with Him that I might do a little “popcorning” of my own. If this has been an area where you have held yourself back too, I would encourage you to do a search of all the verses that talk about happiness and joy in the Scripture, and then maybe join my daughter in a happy dance!

“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous ones; and shout for joy, all you who are upright in heart.” Psalm 32:11