Contentment and the Plain-Jane Everyday

Posted on Mar 12, 2019 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Anne-Renee Gumley

It was late. The kids had been in bed for several hours, and I was in the laundry room folding clothes while waiting for my husband to come home from a long day at work. Clothes that had accumulated into mountains throughout the week filled the tiny space, as though they were fulfilling the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Resentful notions tossed around in my head, keeping time with the dryer tumbling over and over, until discontentment was the reigning queen of my thoughts.

I wish we didn’t live here. If we just moved, everything would be different. I would be so much happier.

As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the mulling continued, and that tiny seed of discontentment grew into a bitter secret garden. It became a place I liked to go and relax every now and again, comforting myself with this cheerful, though false, reality.

Sometimes we find ourselves restless in our current season and begin to think that if [fill in the blank] would change, all our wishes could come true. We would, to borrow Elizabeth Bennet’s phrase from Pride and Prejudice, be “completely, and perfectly, and incandescently happy.” We yearn for contentment but suppose its location is somewhere other than our current situation or setting. And if you’re like me, you find yourself believing that lie—that things will all be better in the future once the present circumstance changes. And that our happiness hinges on that change!

Of course, the enemy of our souls would like to keep us in this exact place of yearning and discontentment. For us to fester and ooze our whinings and woes out onto our families, sharing them with our friends, sowing seeds of “there must be something better out there, something more” wherever we go. Like contagious diseases, unhappiness and disappointment are quick to spread, leaving behind crops of hopelessness and unhealthy hankering.

But praise God! When truth is present, the lies of the enemy don’t stand a chance!

For as we trust God’s heart, we begin to grasp and comprehend what He is using to propel us forward, drawing us to Himself. Those things that prune us and shape us, bringing hope to our families and hope to our souls, helping us become the people He created us to be, for His glory.

With the Lord by our side, we can choose blessing amid dissatisfaction. As the psalmist wrote, “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1). In light of such truth, we discover that contentment is not dependent on the state of the situation, but rather an attitude to be chosen. Even when seasons are hard and the laundry’s piled sky high.