Contentment

 

   What does it mean to be content? What comes to your mind when you think of contentment?   Maybe a little baby snuggled up in a soft blanket just gazing around with no cares in the world, maybe sitting on a front porch on a hot day with a glass of tea, or reaching the top of the trail on a mountain hike and just soaking in the beauty of everything below you.  Those scenes to me would exemplify contentment.  It would be enough in that moment.  But those moments surely aren’t my everyday life. 

   Is contentment possible when the kids are going through a rough stage and demand constant attention?  Is contentment possible when the economy is bad and your finances are headed the same way?  Is contentment possible when all the people around you are gifted at so many things, and you just really don’t have any showy gifts?  Or in my own life right now, is contentment possible when I haven’t felt well for months and the getting better is taking its time?  Is contentment a choice or a circumstance?

 

    I’m on this contentment thought because last Sunday we had a visiting preacher at our church and this was his topic.  It spoke to me.  He talked a lot about material things and being content (which was very timely with it being the Christmas season, although that wasn’t his point).  There are so many ways (often small ones) in which I’m not completely content.  And those are my own choices.  Choices that I want to change.    

 

Contentment is not satisfaction. It is the grateful, faithful, fruitful use of what we have, little or much. It is to take the cup of Providence, and call upon the name of the Lord. What the cup contains is its contents. To get all there is in the cup is the act and art of contentment. Not to drink because one has but half a cup, or because one does not like its flavour, or because someone else has silver to one's own glass, is to lose the contents; and is the penalty, if not the meaning of discontent. No one is discontented who employs and enjoys to the utmost what he has. It is high philosophy to say, we can have just what we like, if we like what we have; but this much at least can be done, and this is contentment,--to have the most and best in life, by making the most and best of what we have.
Maltbie Davenport (Mattie D) Babcock  1858 –1901

 

 

I planted some tulip bulbs today. 

Yes, I know it’s late for that. 

    But I was observing those dead looking hard brown lumps and I want to be like them.  I want to be satisfied to be small and dry and brown and live under the earth, forgotten.  Until...  Spring.  Then I will rise and bloom.  And until then I will be content with who God has made me, the body He has given me, and the circumstances and journey He is leading me on. 

 

 

 

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content

with what you have, for he has said,

 “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Hebrews 13:5