Contentment

          You know the part of the movie where the lead character has been through major relationship issues, and she (or he) searches for something to take her mind off of it?  She channel surfs for several minutes but can only find sappy romances.  After giving up on the TV, she tries to listen to the radio.  When she figures out that all of the stations are currently playing love songs, she decides to get some air.  On her walk, she sees about ten different couples.  No matter what she does, she can’t escape it. 

            The past few days have been a little like that for me, except it has been another lesson that just keeps popping up everywhere.  If God hasn’t done this with you yet, trust me, He will.  He knows that we can be thick-headed and good at ignoring or explaining away the messages He is trying to get through to us.  That, or He knows we aren’t wanting to face those areas of our life that need to be addressed.  So, He repeats Himself – using anyone and anything in our lives to get our attention.      

            On Thursday, I went to the evening chapel at Maranatha Bible Camp (my husband was at camp all week leading worship for around four hundred middle schoolers).  The subject of Pastor John Stone’s message was contentment.  One particular quote that grabbed my attention went something like this: “The secret to contentment is trusting that God is good enough and powerful enough to have already given us everything we need to live an abundant life.”  I don’t need more than what I already have to enjoy and to fulfill God’s purpose for my life today.    

I am in a ladies’ small group that is going through a study on Philippians in the First 5 app, and Friday’s study was about contentment.  The picture quote by Karen Ehman that accompanied the verses and the teaching said: “Lord, teach me to embrace my circumstances, knowing it is You alone who gives me the strength to accept where You have me right now.” Paul wrote about contentment from prison while facing all sorts of accusations.  He also wrote about how his imprisonment was advancing the gospel.  He is an amazing example of embracing unwelcome circumstances by seeing them from God’s perspective.

On Saturday morning, God brought to mind some notes that I took while reading Disciplines of a Godly Woman by Barbara Hughes during my first year at Frontier School of the Bible.  I dug those notes out and found a quote that she used from The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs: “Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.”  I pulled out the book and re-read the chapter.  Later, Hughes writes “The rare jewel of Christian contentment will be yours when all that God is and all that He has done in Christ Jesus fills your heart.”             

            Lately, I have been anything but content.  I thought about what the opposite of Burroughs’s definition would be and came up with this: discontentment is that harried, disturbed, divided, insatiable frame of spirit, which frantically pushes against and distrusts God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.  This is where we naturally go when we want more than what God has chosen to give us.  At least, it’s where I go.  Discontentment is fueled every day by advertisements, social media, movies, TV shows, music, and more.  Of course we are inclined to be discontent!

            Contentment must be learned, and it must be intentionally chosen.  I have to choose to dwell on who God is and what He has done.  I know from experience that I end up in a far better state of mind by letting those truths fill me up than by following after Eve and suspiciously accusing Him of withholding good from me.  I have to believe that I can live abundantly now.  He has already given me every spiritual blessing and everything I need to be completely satisfied and content in Him.  This doesn’t mean that I won’t ever have desires or that I shouldn’t ever pursue my desires.  It does mean that my heart needs to be kept in check.  I need to be okay with the idea that my desires won’t be fulfilled if they do not line up with God’s will, and I need to trust that His will is good and perfect.  He should be my first pursuit.  As my heart aligns with His, I will find contentment that is independent of my circumstances and a rest that allows me to thrive and bloom exactly where I am at right now.        

Trust Issues & Lone Wolves

            We all want to believe that we can face anything on our own.  Maybe God can help a little, but we certainly don’t want to need other people.  Like the toddler who wants to do everything herself, we feel we have to prove to ourselves and to everyone else that we are strong, brave, courageous, fierce, independent, self-sufficient, and grown-up.  Besides, other people come with far too much risk.  We’ve been down that vulnerable road before, and it didn’t end well.

            The trouble is God didn’t create us to operate as lone wolves.  He placed within us an innate need for deep, real, raw relationships – not just with Himself, but with other people as well.  Sin certainly makes relationships hard.  Some of us have been shaken to our core by the lies, betrayal, cheating, insensitivity, and manipulation dealt to us by the most unexpected of sources.  Only a small taste of such use and abuse can make the sheltered life of the lone wolf suddenly appear irresistibly attractive. 

            If that is where you are, I am genuinely so sorry for the very real and legitimate wounds that have brought you to this place.  However, can I encourage you not to give up completely on allowing yourself to trust other people and to be open with them?  Obviously, we need to have discernment with regard to whom we trust, and we don’t have to let the whole world see our entire lives.  Nevertheless, I’ve struggled alone and I’ve struggled alongside others, and I can tell you that the benefits of being transparent (even if it’s only with a few) far outweigh the risks associated with being close to other sinful people.  Here are five of the benefits I have found in allowing myself to be vulnerable:   

1.  Intimacy (Closeness)

       Relationships are built around knowing and being known.  The more we know, the tighter the bond between us becomes (even though the risk also becomes much higher for greater hurts).  Our unseen hearts, the truest depths of who we are, long to be seen and understood.  We want close bonds.  Close marriages, close friendships, and other close family relationships cannot exist where one or both of the parties refuse to be vulnerable.  If we hold back from being truly known by anyone else, we forfeit the closeness that we so desperately crave.       

2.  Ability to Help Others

       Being open about your own struggles provides opportunities to make a difference in the lives of those you may never have been able to otherwise.  Often, a gesture of transparency and trust on one side allows the other person to feel safe enough to reciprocate that transparency and trust.  Needs to which you would have been completely oblivious suddenly become rich opportunities for service.   

3.  Ability to Receive Help

       When we’ve been hurt, our natural instinct is to put up tall, foreboding, impermeable walls of distrust.  Those walls we build in an attempt to protect ourselves from more pain end up becoming our prison.  No one can come in to hurt, but no one can come in to help either.  Inadvertently, we lock ourselves away alone with our struggles where they can slowly eat away at us from the inside out – crippling us to the point where we don’t even recognize who we are anymore. 

Ecclesiastes 4:9, 10

 

4.  Strength for Your Weakness

       God made us with our own unique set of strengths and weaknesses.  No one is strong in every area.  When we allow people into our hearts and lives, their strengths can balance out our weaknesses so that we are stronger together than when we were apart.  We can learn from each other, keep each other accountable, and spur each other on in the areas where we are lacking.      

5.  Hope

       When I’ve tried to face trials alone, all I can see is the mountain in front of me and the fact that God has not chosen to move it yet.  When I’ve walked alongside others in the same struggle as a result of being transparent, I still see my own mountain, but I also see how God is currently working and moving the mountains that my friends are facing.  Seeing Him work in the lives of others gives me hope that He hasn’t forgotten me and that I will eventually see His work in my own life clearly.

I am so thankful for the many people God has placed in my life in different times and different places.  Yes, I’ve been hurt by some (just as I have hurt others), but those hurts cannot compare with what I’ve gained by allowing people into my heart.  I cannot adequately express just how valuable many of those relationships have been to me.  To all those who have walked with me (and are currently walking with me) in the darkness and the haziness that life sometimes brings, thank you for your vulnerability, for your transparency, and for your trust.  Thank you for being a safe place. To those who are reading this who have never experienced what it is like to do life with other people – real, raw, unfiltered life –  please find your people!  If you don’t know how, talk to God about it.  Talk to me about it.  Talk to someone about it until you can find your safe people.  We need each other, whether we like it or not.      

           

Clay gods

Public school told me I could be anyone or anything I wanted to be.  Mainstream Media popularized phrases like: “I do what I want,” “Don’t ever let someone tell you what you can’t do,” and “You do you.”  Books, t-shirts, mugs, wall art, and eye-catching memes all told me to dream big and to take command of my destiny.  Especially as a woman, I’ve often heard the message that I should reach for the stars and resist fitting into a certain box – unless of course that box is an executive office.  I’ve had unbelievable opportunities at my fingertips, and for that, I am truly grateful. 

However, somewhere along the line, I bought too much into the American dream.  With this inspirational message of limitless empowerment so prevalently preached, I found myself squirming a little bit when I read Romans 9:21.  It was one of my least favorite verses for a very long time (am I allowed to say that?).  It says:

Nobody wants to be a soup bowl.  Shouldn’t we all be made into David, The Thinker, or the Statue of Liberty? Don’t we all deserve to be molded into something glorious?  On the surface, this verse makes God’s sovereignty seem completely unappealing.  Our hearts cry out in protest with accusations of favoritism.  We question God’s love, justice, wisdom, and goodness.  We believe we have a right to equal treatment, equal opportunity, and equal blessing.  Equality becomes our standard for righteousness and justice instead of God Himself.  Lost in our own selfish desires for more, we forget that we already are all equal.  We all consist of the same formless clay – the same sinful substance.  All that we deserve is to be sent away from the Potter forever and discarded without the hope of ever fulfilling the purpose that He originally intended for us.  His love, justice, wisdom, and goodness are shown in the very fact that He chooses to work in us at all.  To work differently in different people’s lives is His prerogative. 

For me, my skewed view of equality wasn’t the only reason this verse didn’t sit well for so long.  Another facet of the American dream had become ingrained into my heart before I even realized what was happening.  The world taught me to believe in myself– which seems admirable and harmless, right?  Yet, everything can be taken to unhealthy extremes.  As much as I hate to admit it, I believed in myself more than I believed in God.  My desire to choose for myself exactly how my life would turn out seemed safer and more desirable than God’s perfect choice.  I elevated my own understanding, character, and morality over God’s and made Him out to be far smaller than He is.  One of the great battles of the Christian life is learning to see God as He is and to see ourselves as we are.  “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30).

In his commentary, Romans: Righteousness from Heaven, R. Kent Hughes notes the following concerning Romans 9:21: “The fact is, God is perfect.  Perfect in knowledge, wisdom, power, presence, faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, and holiness.  Therefore, he is perfect in his choices.  God does not answer to anyone, is not responsible to anyone.  He is totally, absolutely sovereign.”  Isn’t that what we so often want to be true of ourselves?  We want to be the Potter.  We lust after God’s sovereignty and wish we didn’t have to answer to anyone.  What a mess we would make of our lives in our limited perspective and understanding if that were so.

He does give us the gift of freedom and choice – a paradox that we can’t totally wrap our minds around.  He doesn’t force us to follow Him.  However, He is no less God, and He is still in charge, regardless of how sincerely we believe that we are in control.  We can kick back against that fact and try to live as little gods, but as our imperfect choices inevitably clash against God’s plan and design for the world, we will eventually reap the consequences of those choices and be faced with the truth.  Our wisdom is no match for His, our sense of justice is seriously flawed, and our desires and dreams are blind to the full picture.  What it all comes down to is this: will we choose to hold God high and trust His character even when the choices He makes aren’t the ones we think He should make? Or, will we hold ourselves high, certain that our own choices are far better than God’s perfect and holy design?