Contentment Lesson #1

I decided to take you all on a 12 week journey with me - so that hopefully you can keep me accountable and that by posting my thoughts I will have the courage to grow!

In my final week at IWU, a lady that I really look up to, and really has been a mentor to me, gave me the book "Calm My Anxious Heart" by Linda Dillow as we catted over lunch and said our goodbyes. In the craziness and adjustment of the last month, I hadn't picked it up, and I probably should have.

The book is about finding contentment...yeah, definitely should have read it sooner. Because just in the first chapter alone, I was really convicted about not being content with my life right now.

The author talks about several things. First, she talked about how contentment begins with an eternal perspective. As she wrote: "When we have God's perspective, we view our lives and evaluate what is important from His viewpoint." She shared one missionary's "prescription" for contentment:

• Never allow yourself to complain about anything - not even the weather.
• Never picture yourself in any other circumstance or someplace else.
• Never compare your lot with another's.
• Never allow yourself to wish this or that had been otherwise.
• Never dwell on tomorrow - remember that [tomorrow] is God's, not ours.

That was pretty humbling and challenging to read.

The author's next point was that contentment happens on the inside, "a peace separate from [our] circumstances." She points out a no-brainer (but is still hard to do): "Contentment is a state of the heart, not a state of affairs."

Her next section was titled: The Secret to Contentment. She talks about the apostle Paul and one of the many times he was in jail, where he wrote in Philippians 4:11-13 about being content. The secret is that contentment is only through Jesus' strength, not our own. It is when He "infuses" His strength into us. She used the idea of a tea bag, and talked about infusing "contentment into us through His Word." How it "seeps into our minds, it transforms us." And the longer you let your tea bag seep, the stronger your tea gets! The same is true with God - the more we spend time and let His Word seep into us, the more content and transformed we will truly be.

This next part was hard for me...she talked about moving from control to contentment. I like to have my life orderly and in place. I am a perfectionist. Let go of trying to control my life??? That's scary to me, and something I have always struggled with. As the author said: God doesn't need our help. I know, really hard concept to grasp, huh?!? :) But words I needed to hear {again} in my life right now. She quoted J.I. Packer: "Contentment is essentially a matter of accepting from God's hand what He sends because we know that He is good and therefore it is good." Can I really say that what is happening in my life is GOOD? I was definitely challenged by the truth of that quote. Psalm 16:5 says "Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure." Elisabeth Elliot is quoted when talking about this verse and she said "A quiet heart is content with what God gives."

I was challenged by something else that Linda Dillow wrote. She kept up her tea analogy in a way - she talked about how God created us to be a unique, special teacup. And we can be like Christ, when before He was crucified, He pleaded with God the Father to "take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done." Jesus had to choose to accept His cup as well, just as I must decide to accept mine. With God's strength I can accept, bear, and even find contentment in my "cup". If we don't, we are saying that we want to control our own life, and there is where we find discontent.

She quotes a story at the end of chapter 1. It talks about a monk who needed oil so he planted an olive tree sapling. He prayed to God for what the plant needed to live - rain, sun, etc and the Lord answered his prayer every time. But the plant died. Another monk also planted a tree but he entrusted his plant to God. His perspective was "Lord, send me what it needs. Storm or sunshine, wind, rain, or frost. Thou hast made it and Thou dost know."

The author writes: "I had failed to make God my trust because I tried too hard. You may be like me or you may be at the other end of the spectrum. You fail to make God your trust by default. Your life is out of control, so you give up. It's impossible to make sense of life, beyond impossible to be content, so you give up and give in. Most of us either try to hard or we quit trying. In both cases, we miss God. We miss his infusion of strength that leads to contentment."

I hope that through this journey over the next several weeks - with your help, too - that in the end I will "see God in a new way. [I] will know in [my] heart that He is the one who is the Blessed Controller of all things, the King of kings and the Lord of lords!"