Choosing joy, forming good habits, and living the blessed life

“A saint who is sad is a sad example of a saint.” – St. Francis de Sales

God has given us so many blessings, and He wants us to be happy. He has filled our lives with joys of all kinds, and He delights when we receive them well. While adversity and tragedy are part of every person’s life, they do not need to define us. Nor do they need to keep us from experiencing the joy God desires for us. Receiving God’s blessings and living well are the subjects of a new book by Melissa Overmyer, and throughout its pages, we can take a transformative journey from our current state of mind to a life filled with happiness.

Entitled Living the Blessed Life: Seven Keys to Trusting God and Embracing Joy, the book “is a seven-week personal retreat designed to leave you more joyful and grounded, with daily reflections, journaling space, and morning and evening prayer prompts enriched by timeless wisdom from Scripture and the saints.”

I had the privilege of chatting with Melissa about her new book, her faith journey, and why we should all strive for happiness, and she shared what inspired her to write this book.

Melissa was born and raised a Southern Baptist and grew up loving and teaching scripture. After she married her husband, they both felt called to go deeper sacramentally, so they tried different denominations, but nothing really resonated with her until she discovered the beauty of the Catholic Church. Melissa converted in 2010, and her husband converted several years after that.

Melissa went on to earn her master’s in Catholic theology and began writing, something that had always been her passion. She wrote in depth about her conversion and how “scripture is applicable to everyday life.” Another of her books, entitled From Worry to Wonder: A Catholic Guide to Finding Peace through Scripture, helped her deal with some personal tragedies by seeking solace in God’s word.

She soon found herself asking the Lord how to live a happy, normal life without becoming trapped in a cycle of dwelling on tragedy and loss. That’s when she said she heard the word “blessing” in her heart, and she realized, “I had habits for unhappiness, and I could choose which direction to go. I could either choose to look at the dark side of everything, or I could choose to look at the lighter side, the things that He had put right before my very eyes.” And she explained, “That made the difference in the habits I would form, and that’s how [the book] came to be.”

Living the Blessed Life uses the letters in the word BLESSED to highlight seven keys to trusting God and embracing joy: Beauty, Laughter, Encounter, Song, Silence, Engage, and Distinct.

Melissa said she was drawn to these particular words because they aligned with Scripture, with teachings from saints, and also with the latest modern research on happiness, including the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which found that the number one thing we all need in order to flourish and to live a happy life is love. This resonated with Melissa, and she pointed out, “As Christians, our number one source of love is God.”

So she incorporated all seven habits around these words to “dwell in the beauty of God.” Through her many examples, she explains how we can add these practices into our daily lives to become more joyful in Christ.

The book dives into each of the words that make up BLESSED, offers suggestions for how to make changes in your life, provides a space to journal daily, and gives prayers for each day. It’s like a roadmap to happiness that helps you discover beauty in nature, encourages encounters with God throughout the day, discusses the importance of silence in prayer, suggests songs that lift your heart to the Lord, encourages fun time with friends and family to connect and laugh, and more.

All of these things not only lead us closer to God and glorify Him with our actions, but they also bring others to God, as they see our joy and want to experience it as well.

Throughout the pages of this book, you will feel uplifted by Melissa’s joy, you will come to see the importance of a smile and of physical contact, you will grow in your relationship not only with God but with others, and you will feel happier with your own life. It’s a journey of the discovery of love—a love of God the Father, a love of self, and a love of others. And Melissa hopes that Living the Blessed Life helps the reader realize that we must focus on the fact that “God is present, and He’s here and He’s right now, and He’s promised you so many good things.”

When we realize that, we are better able to feel joy, even when bad things happen or tragedy strikes.

Melissa explained that happiness is “being able to open yourself up to receive God’s love and be a conduit for it.” And she said she hopes that, after people read this book and journal throughout the seven weeks, that they can form new habits for happiness and will “choose to live better, that they’ll choose to live a blessed life and learn how to embrace the micro joys of each day because we all have a choice” to be happy.

And when you make that choice to be happy and take the time to embrace Melissa’s components of BLESSED, you will come to know the source of all happiness—the love of our Heavenly Father, who wants what’s best for us, who wants us to choose joy, and who longs for us to choose Him.