White Elephant is a popular game of gift exchange at Christmas time. The name of the game comes from an old practice in Southeast Asia where a monarch would give someone the gift of a white elephant. This was viewed as both a blessing and a curse because white elephants were sacred and so could not be used for labor. Thus, whoever received the gift of a white elephant was given a great honor, but also a very expensive animal to care for that had no practical use. Sometimes we try to turn the gifts from our Heavenly Father into white elephants. Let's take joy, for instance. One of our reasons, maybe even the most important reason, for our existence is that we might have joy. Joy is a gift from our Heavenly Father and it is so wonderful when we receive it. But we can't maintain the same level of blissful happiness every moment of every day. Unfortunately, some of us get it into our hearts that if we are ever failing to have joy then there must be something wrong or broken with us. If God created us to have joy and we don't feel happy, then we have to scramble and worry and stress about getting happy quickly so that we don't turn into a big disappointment to ourselves and to our Heavenly Father. We turn a gift into a burden. Joy, in this case, becomes our White Elephant. Whatever gifts or blessings that we desire or that we have been promised are intended to bring joy and peace and rest to our souls. If we have allowed our expectations for ourselves or our gifts to fill our hearts with fear, anxiety, doubt, or depression, then we are turning the bread and fish that our Father gives us into stones and serpents. Just because we aren't happy right now does not mean we have fallen out of favor with God. If we are wading through sorrow and affliction, we have enough to handle without also beating ourselves up because we are failing to be happy in this horrible situation. We can and should live our lives in a way that invites and engenders moments of happiness, but we should never turn the pursuit of happiness into a burden. Joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, weakness and strength will all come into our lives as gifts from a loving Heavenly Father. He has His own reasons for bringing all of these things into our lives at the times that He does. We will not always understand these reasons. If we think we know what the reasons are and those thoughts lead us to add burdens and worries into our lives, then we misunderstood what those reasons were. I hope that we will let go of our expectations for the reasons and the timing of God's gifts to us and we will learn to receive them only as blessings and never as burdens.
