Apparently, WordPress has declared this Quote Week.

Two days ago, it asked for my favorite quote. Now it wants a quote that perfectly describes my outlook on life. At this rate, the next prompt will ask which quotation I would embroider on a decorative pillow and place beside a sign that says Live, Laugh, Love.

This question is different enough that I can answer it without simply copying my previous post, and two quotations come to mind:

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.”

“Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.”

I think they belong together.

The first does not mean that we can simply think ourselves happy. There are circumstances that hurt too deeply for that, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But we can absolutely think ourselves unhappy. We can feed our minds constantly on disappointment, fear, resentment and everything that has gone wrong until those things become the only reality we can see.

My stepdad used to reflect on the old saying, “You are what you eat,” and extend it beyond food. We are also shaped by what we consume mentally and spiritually. What we repeatedly watch, read, hear and rehearse in our minds eventually becomes part of us.

The Bible recognizes that. James tells us to “count it all joy” when we meet trials of various kinds. Paul, writing from prison and facing the possibility of death, repeatedly tells the Philippians to rejoice. Neither man was claiming that suffering is enjoyable or that terrible circumstances somehow become good if we smile hard enough.

Dad used to explain Romans 8:28 in much the same way. “All things work together for good” does not mean that all things are good. Some things are painful, destructive and completely contrary to what God desires. The promise is that the Lord is able to take even those things and eventually use them toward a good outcome.

I have a very personal reason for believing that.

My mother died on July 30, 2007, and we buried her four days later on August 3. Those dates will have just passed again when this post appears. I will never be happy that she died. I will never convince myself that losing her at 67 was a good thing or that the years we lost somehow did not matter.

I could spend the rest of my life thinking only about what cancer took from us. I could dwell on everything she missed, every moment when I wished she were still here and every year we should have had together. Every one of those thoughts would be understandable. Most of them would even be true.

But they would not be the whole truth.

The whole truth includes the things she taught me, the faith she poured into me and the touch she left on countless lives. It includes the fact that I got to have her as my mother. I did not get to keep her as long as I wanted, but I had one of the best mothers I could possibly have been given.

The fruit of her life is not money or property. It is people.

I see it most clearly in my daughter. Lizzi is a better mother today because of the influence my mother had on her life. She understands the value of grandparents because she had one of the best ever as her grandmother.

Because of that, Lizzi has been deliberate about including her own parents in the lives of her children. She has taken every opportunity to involve my ex-wife, me and Daryl in the lives of Sully and Aurelia. She knows that grandparents are not merely extra people who show up for birthdays and holiday photographs. They can shape a child’s faith, character, security and understanding of family.

My mother never met either of her great-grandchildren, but her influence has reached them anyway. The love she gave Lizzi taught Lizzi to make room for us, and now we have the privilege of pouring that same kind of love into another generation.

That brings a very large smile to my face.

Cancer ended my mother’s life, but it did not end the fruit of it.

That is where these two quotations meet for me. I cannot control everything that happens in my life. Nobody can. But I can decide what I will allow to occupy my mind and how I will respond to what has happened.

I can grieve what I lost while remaining grateful for what I had. I can acknowledge the hole my mother’s death left behind without staring only into that hole for the rest of my life. I can mourn her absence while rejoicing in the evidence that her love is still moving through our family.

Making myself miserable would not bring her back. It would not honor her or the Lord she loved. It would only surrender more of my life to the same loss.

So perhaps happiness does depend, at least in part, on the quality of our thoughts. Not because thoughts erase reality, but because they help determine which parts of reality receive our attention.

Life is filled with things we cannot choose.

What we do with them is often still up to us.

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