(Dis)contentment and Perspective

Ahhh to be content!! I recently heard a great talk at church on… you guessed it… contentment. I thought at the time that it was a ‘timely’ message for me… but on reflection, any time would be ‘timely’ when talking about contentment… I mean who isn’t seeking contentment everyday?

(DIS)CONTENTMENT

I’m thankful for so many blessings in my life, and content with lots of things, but there’s definitely a few things that I’m currently discontent with… meet my car…

This is my (awesome) Nissan Pulsar, which my Dad generously acquired for me… for all of a few hundred dollars! Yep, that’s right, not much to pay for a car hey… unfortunately the price reflects the quality of the goods, and in this case, as you might expect, the quality isn’t terribly high! So currently, this car, or rather should I say, not having a nicer car, is my big issue for contentment.

PERSPECTIVE

“we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it”

Nothing like a pin drop of perspective to help with contentment issues… While writing this post, I found out that some good friends just lost their baby an hour after giving birth… simply devastating. My problems of discontentment suddenly seem fairly insignificant and I’m forced to think about bigger things like life & death. I’m reminded of what I heard in the talk on contentment, that “we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Tim 6:7). That is, we were born with nothing, and when we die, we can’t take anything with us.

Cars, gadgets, clothes, money, etc… can’t take them. Makes me thankful that I have a beautiful healthy little girl, an amazing wife, a roof over my head, a dodgy car, and well, SO many other comforts that most of the rest of the world don’t have!

So what to do about the dodgy car? Probably should just be content with it. But if I think about it, even if I do upgrade to a better car, I don’t think this will solve my contentment issues… Nice car, dodgy car, no car… I’ll probably still be discontent with something, because I’m looking for contentment in STUFF!

I know contentment is ultimately only found in Jesus, but as you can tell, living this out is actually pretty hard! What I can do though is use these moments of perspective that God gives us throughout life to remind me of what is really important, and keep coming back to Jesus for ultimate fulfillment – that’s the only place I know I’ll find it!

Contentment is mostly about ‘getting’, so why not challenge your discontentment and do some ‘giving’ – we recently did Operation Christmas Child for the first time… Great program – maybe something you could do too!