Thank you for your kind introduction.

I want to tell you about the worst day of my life

since this is a lecture on happiness.

I start with the opposite extreme.

So I got this dream job in Washington, D.C.

It was a director of the Honors Program.

And I was so excited to move my family across the country

and started to see a position.

It was about a 40% raise over what I was making before.

And when I got there, it was actually much better

than I thought it would be.

So I made all these friends, and I was in this this wonderful parish and things were really, really great.

So there was one small, actually one huge problem, namely that my wife hated it in Washington, D.C.

She absolutely hated it.

So I thought to myself, well, I will change this situation.

So I thought, why even start praying? And I'm going to pray that God somehow changes her mind and her heart, that she really starts to love living in Washington. So that's what I started to do. So I said, praying, praying. Nothing changed at all, right? Nothing got better at all. So eventually, about a month or two later, I came to my wife, I said, well, honey,

I didn't really pray for you that you're

in love Washington and stayed here in D.C.

And I just want to let you know I go pray every day

for that.

And she said, well, that's very interesting.

So if you ask God what God wants? And I thought, oh, Lord, no, I haven't done that. So finally, I thought, I don't want to ask God what God wants, because what if God wants me to go back to Los Angeles? That's the last thing I want. So I was afraid to pray. And then after maybe three weeks of that, well, you know, God is all knowing and all loving. And well, maybe I should like checking with God just to see. And maybe, you know. Anyway, so I prayed about it. And I pretty much came to conviction right away that I family ought to move back to Los Angeles. So we're back to Los Angeles. And I'd like to tell you that when I got back to Los Angeles,

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