Gladness comes to us as an outcome of being adept at the other seven feelings we carry inside of us. The other seven feelings are fear, hurt, sadness, loneliness, anger, shame, and guilt (The Voice of the Heart). Our feelings allow us to respond to life on life’s terms.

If we become adept at experiencing the other seven feelings, we become glad. We experience a general sense of well-being because we are capable of living life on life’s terms. When we face and feel life with hope, longings, desire, we will have a multitude of celebrations, minute and large, and a multitude of losses, large and minute. Even so, we will have participated in the experience of living as we are made to live. We will have participated in the experience of creation by being fully alive to all that life has to offer.

Everything that has life in it seeks its fulfillment and completion. It seeks gladness, so to speak. We are created to have an expression of gladness as we move along the path of fulfillment to live fully, love deeply, and lead well in a way that leaves something behind.

Part of Gladness is Pain

Again, gladness is a result of being adept at feeling the other seven feelings. We live towards fulfillment by taking emotional and spiritual risks with our heart’s needs, desire, longings, and hope. With reaching, risking, caring, and growing comes inevitable struggle. I don’t like it, but we live in a broken place with heavenly imaginations. This place is one of tragedy in which we struggle to connect our hope, faith, and love to fulfillment.

But we cannot have fulfillment without pain, and no celebration exists without it either, for even celebration have ends. Life to the full is actually lived between how well we celebrate and grieve. Willingness to care and connect, and grieve the inevitable losses brought on by attachment, make up the fulfilled life on this earth.

By admitting our condition of powerlessness over how we are created as emotional and spiritual creatures, surrendering our hearts’ makeup to God’s process, and struggling daily with acceptance, we can live fully and well. Through living this process over and over again, we are able to derive the experience of gladness in our lives.