Welcome to Living Happy, a super short weekly encouragement sharing insights and action steps for living a happy life, where I share passages directly from my book, The Year of Living Happy. And it's available now. If you don't already have your copy, you can get it wherever books are sold. Let's dive in for today's Living Happy Minute.

Breakfast with Jesus. Peter is my favorite

disciple because of how obviously flawed and human he is. Man, I can relate to Peter. I just, I love him.

After he denied knowing Jesus three times, he was completely and pretty understandably devastated.

Believing his time as a disciple was over,

he returned to his previous way of life as a fisherman. I mean, isn't that like all of us? When we feel

lost, we return so fast to our old ways. But even when we do, God continues to come after us,

doesn't he? As Peter sat in his boat along with the other disciples,

he felt lost. Not only had he failed to come to the aid of Jesus when he needed him most,

now Peter couldn't even catch fish. He'd been fishing all night and had nothing to show for it.

Then, from the shore, a man tells them to cast their net to the other side of the boat.

They did.

And when they did, they caught 153 large fish.

John, who was with Peter on the boat, announced it that it was the Lord on the shore.

And Peter leapt into the water to find his way back to Jesus.

Peter didn't stay stuck in his own failures on that bow. He wasn't

going to waste another minute finding his way to Jesus' arms. By the time Peter reached Jesus on the

shore, I'm sure he expected Jesus to let him have it. Instead, he found Jesus ready to receive him back

into his grace. And with a hot breakfast, How often do we do this in our own lives?

We're so quick to replace the grace-filled words of Jesus with the condemnation we feel that we should get for

our mistakes. We forget that because Jesus, and only because of Jesus, there is no longer any condemnation left for us.

Jesus received our punishment so that we could instead receive his love. Romans 8.1 says this

...