Are We Having Fun Yet?

This was a question asked at the height of the hedonistic 1970s.

The party had been going for about three hours and the clock was approaching midnight when the young man next to me asked, "Are we having fun yet?"

Could it be that sex, drugs, and rock and roll wasn't actually fun?

Some people say that the pursuit of pleasure creates a death wish.
But I would suggest that the death wish was in the rock music that we were constantly listening to.

It was not for another decade that I discovered what rock music actually was - black,  Satanic magic!

But the question remains - Is it pleasure that makes us happy?

I would suggest that it is not.

What brings happiness is love - our relationships with others and with God.

Pleasure is a pale facsimile of love.

But everything we see and hear in the media tells us otherwise.
That house, that car, that job, more money, more possessions, status, power, respect.....
These things, we are told, will make us happy.

They won't.

"I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh"  Ezekiel 11:19b (NRSV)

This means that God will give us a heart that loves people not things.


(Scripture quotations (marked NRSV) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission.  All rights reserved.)