Monthly Archives: May 2015

On Gratitude and Contentment: an update

I’ve had quite a few conversations about this topic over the past weeks. The previous post was born out of one conversation and birthed more conversations. My head has been swimming with thoughts about contentment. And today I ran across a blog post by a favorite ministry team, RC Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries. I thought I’d share it here. It’s completely relevant to the conversations and to the previous post.

Godliness with contentment is great gain. (1 Tim 6:6)

Learning Contentment, Sinclair Ferguson

Many blessings. May we all learn to be content, whether in abundance or in want.

Gratitude and Contentment

In what is perhaps my favorite piece of commercial fiction (Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher), the main character’s new friend, Oscar, explains that while he is not really a religious person, he nevertheless believes in God because “…I would find it very uncomfortable to live in a world where I had no person to thank.” When I first read that quote (right after the book was published because I enjoy reading this author), it resonated with me and I never forgot it. I am a lot like Oscar. I am filled with gratitude most of the time. I even have a decorative sign that says, “gratitude” in pretty script hanging at work.

I was talking with a friend the other day about gratitude, and he mentioned contentment, saying he thought the two must needs be go hand in hand. At that moment, I thought it sounded logical, but I wasn’t completely comfortable with the theory. While a person who is content should be grateful for all the blessings that make her thus, maybe she isn’t because unlike me and Oscar, she has no one to thank, or maybe she thinks all the blessings are hers by right or privilege. And how about the grateful person: me, for instance? A person whose life is so marked by gratitude for so many blessings is probably quite content.

After pondering this for a bit, I have determined that contentment and gratitude are more or less independent of one another. I can say this with absolute certainty because in spite of my overflowing gratitude, I would not say I am very content. Why not? I have all my needs and most of my wants met, I have people and animals in my life that I love, my job is enjoyable, my vocations are fulfilling, my health is good, I’m reasonably fit, I live in a beautiful area with loads of history, I travel…what more do I need? I have so incredibly much that I thank God sometimes several times a day; what else do I need or want so that I will finally be content?

Nothing. I need nothing and want very little, and surely our loving Father owes me nothing at all. But I have come to believe that my contentment (or lack thereof) is not at all about what God has given me. Rather it is about my response to Him and all of His many gifts. Because if the truth is known (and it’s about to be), I am often a disobedient child who refuses to do the things that will make me more like Him, and instead I act out of wilfulness or rebellion or both:
Instead of getting up a few minutes early to pray, sometimes (like this morning) I burrow under the quilts for a bit more sleep.
Rather than pray for the one who speaks ill of me, I slander her, either aloud or in my thoughts, and often both.
I’m prone to blame others for things that go wrong.
I don’t often share with those in need.
I’m slow to forgive and quick to blame.
I judge.
I become angry too quickly.
I give in too easily to gluttony and materialism.

I could go on but I don’t like to look bad to my readers, so I’ll stop there. (Can you hear my sigh of exasperation?)

In all seriousness, though… while I’m grateful for all the blessings, I know that sometimes I am not a blessing to others, nor even to myself. This disappoints me. And I wonder if it disappoints the One who made me. I know He wants the best for me, and He is making me in His image. What if these many weaknesses are trying to show me something? What if contentment eludes me because of my lack of cooperation with my Father? What if my own behavior is the very thing that keeps me from being content?

There is an old book called The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, by a lady named Hannah Whitall Smith. Smith was a Quaker and in the mid to late 1800’s, she was a member of the Holiness movement; out of that was born this book in 1875. It was given to me many years ago by a friend who knew me well, and I didn’t read it until just recently. (And frankly, I still haven’t finished it, but let’s talk about THAT character flaw another time, shall we?) The “secret,” according to Ms. Smith, can be summed up in one word: obedience. If we are obedient to what we know we must do, we will be “happy.” If I get up when the alarm goes off and spend some time in prayer and the Word, if I don’t judge others, if I forgive, if I control my tongue…if I do all those things, I will be happy, or at least content. It sounds banal, doesn’t it?

It also sounds simple. If my behavior is standing in the path between gratitude and contentment, then before I can take the next step I must change my behavior. I must make different choices. My choices need to be consistent with what I know to be true. Behavior that doesn’t align with beliefs brings discontent.

Obedience is, at the very least, a good place to start when we’re looking to move from gratitude to contentment. It’s not like it’s the answer to all of life, though. Or is it?

Remind Me

I write down everything important. I do this because if I don’t, I will forget. Appointments, errands, birthdays, three-item grocery lists — it doesn’t matter. I will forget it if I don’t write it down. They tell me this is a hazard of growing older. Maybe so, but it’s sort of always been that way for me.

A few years ago, I looked in the mirror and literally asked myself, aloud, “Who ARE you?” I felt like I was looking at a stranger. Of all the things I need to be reminded about, suddenly I needed to be reminded of who I used to be because the person who looked out of those eyes and into mine was someone I didn’t even recognize; it seemed I had become someone I had never intended to be. Divorced twice, often depressed, generally joyless and known by friends to enjoy drinking, I was nothing like the person I had been ten years before. I asked myself what had happened to bring me to that place and the only answers I could come up with were self-pitying and self-serving, so I threw them out. Over the course of the next years, the reflection in the mirror didn’t change much, and neither did the way I felt and thought about myself. I did, however, begin asking God to return me to the place where I’d come from, and to remind me of who He had intended me to be, of who I once was, and more importantly of Whose I am.

Over these years, I’ve had my heart broken several times. Unrequited love, disappointment with people, the deaths of those close to me. There’s a terrible danger to broken hearts; they take their toll and make demands that must be answered. Each wound presents the sufferer with a choice: grab hold of God or push Him away. In the moments when I gave in to my soul, I suffered for it by seeing my true self slip a little farther away. Thankfully those times frightened me enough that more often, I chose to cling to Christ, to recall His words to me, and to implore Him to hold me tightly so I wouldn’t lose my way.

There’s a particular song that has been meaning a lot to me for the past year or so. “When I lose my way, and I forget my name, remind me who I am. When in the mirror all I see is who I don’t want to be remind me who I am.” I could’ve written those lyrics. I wish I had, but thankfully, someone did, and put them to music, and someone else played them on the radio, and they help me every time I hear them to remember.

I’m a ragamuffin, but I’m loved by the Father, and that is enough.

Remind Me Who I Am Lyrics