The Hunt for Happiness: Conversations on truth uses my life, fictive stories, and characters to focus on why we make it so hard to help and love one another.  That struggle, focused on controlling rules and behaviors, is the major theme throughout the book.  The ultimate goal is to live in world similar to the Kingdom of God where I believe people help each other maximize their potentials.  When we become people who are made happy by the success of the other, we’ve finished the hunt.  Of course, we will never finish, not until the Kingdom comes.

I’ve centered the book on normal people struggling, as I have, with the very concept of normality.  The range of characters includes both struggling and inspiring characters from the Christian and Jewish communities, some of whom are also members of the LGBT community because I know and have known such people and have found them helpful, loving, and inspiring.

And now the jump.  In Tina Turner’s classic song “What’s love got to do with it“, we hear “What’s love but a second hand emotion … who needs a heart when a heart can be broken“.  The Good News, the Gospel, is indeed second hand, passed down for generation after generation.  So, too, the Bible, the Qur’an, and so forth and so on.  Still, I can say from personal experiences that God is with us right here right now.  Plenty of people have such encounters, perhaps 10% of the population, and we’re not crazy, at least not most of us.  I’m talking about being in the presence, not seeing a figure on a piece of toast, mind you.

And I can tell you that we break God’s heart, I break God’s heart.  He loves us all so very much but we hate and kill each other.   Read the prophets with that in mind.  Love has everything to do with it, and Jesus has everything to do with love – love of God, love of neighbor, and self sacrificing love.

Christian theology tells us that Jesus reconciled us with the Father.  Now we must set about the hard task of reconciling ourselves with each other, through love, sacrifice, without imposing lots of rules, and with the help of God.  That’s what my book is really about.