There is a kind of happiness that can easily make you smile or laugh. Sometimes it can even be so overwhelming that it makes you cry. After a while, however, you realize that your feelings slowly start to fade. Somehow, you find it harder and harder to remember the way you felt before. Eventually, you may wonder whether you’ve been really happy at all.
On the other hand, there is a happiness that doesn’t seem like happiness at the start. It’s so subtle that it almost speaks in whispers. It moves ever gently you may fail to notice it’s there. But if you pay attention to it and you give it time, and if you allow it to touch you and to enter your heart, you’d see how it would grow steadily from day to day. You’d understand it more and more.
Unlike the first kind of happiness, this one doesn’t quickly fade. This one doesn’t excite you only to let you down. But this kind of happiness grows deep until it takes root. It changes you and moves you. It penetrates your very soul.
This kind of happiness is not a sudden rain that dissipates the heat for a while only to leave you dry again. This happiness is a fountain that never ends, a source of water you can come back to again and again, filling your every need and satisfying the deepest desires of your heart.
Now if there are two kinds of happiness, which one would you rather have?
The thing about hope is that it’s a positive force that shines the most when it’s dark. When everything’s going well, we hardly notice it’s there. But when things go against us, when our dreams fade and when we see no immediate reprieve from our troubles, that’s when hope does its best work for us.
"Where Hope Can Be Found"