Prosperity

Every year Christmas lies to me. Every year Christmas lets me down. And this is the lie: things will make you happy. I’m almost hesitant to write anything about this because we’ve all heard it before and we all know it’s true. However … this is another one of those deals where it doesn’t matter what you know in your head unless you also know it in your heart. So with a prayer that the Holy Spirit will use this to move the truth to a deeper level within us, I will proceed.

Those of us to live in the electronic generation have been lied to more than any other generation that has lived on the earth. The lie is the smile. We’ve all seen the smile. Thousands and thousands of times.

It is not an ordinary smile. An ordinary smile is a lovely thing. It is a sign that the person behind the smile is experiencing some measure of happiness. The ordinary smile is not the smile that has been used to lie to us. The lying smile is a face that is literally beaming with happiness. It is a face that is radiantly joyful.

Normal human beings are familiar with this smile, although we don’t use it very often. The two examples that leap out at me are the way my wife smiled on the day we were married and the way she smiled right after the birth of our two children. Radiant, complete, total happiness.

This is the smile that all of the people in the commercials wear. Only instead of a wedding or the birth of a child, they are wearing that smile because finally, at last, they can afford to drive the right truck and drink the right beer. I finally got that big screen high def TV. Look at my radiant smile.

It’s all a lie. The people displaying those smiles are all actors. The director yells “action” and all of the actors begin the grin like idiots. Then he yells “cut” and all the smiles vanish. We never get to see what happens after the director yells cut.