contentment & perspective

This morning, I woke up with ‘stuff’ racing through my mind. I went early to the coffee-shop to read / think / pray and I came across this long quote from Eric Rena: (www.mrrena.com)

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.� �1 Timothy 6:6–7

The only eyes through which we have ever peered into the world are our own. There are certainly times�many times�that we feel an empathy and connectedness to other persons, yet for all of that, any connection we share has to be realized through the “interface� in which we interact and connect with the world. Our bodies are themselves a necessary shell for our stay here on earth because through them we are both known and make ourselves known and are able to interact with other things and people in our environments. Being human beings, there are certain predictable ways we react to our environment that are common to our species. However, there are also little quirks and behaviors that we share with no other. These points are important to our discussion today for one reason: while feelings may rise in our response to the world around us, they are nonetheless things that exist within our own being, not in the external world. Being human beings, it is very natural that the pain we experience in regard to death, separation, sickness, and other factors out of our control is entirely appropriate and fully understandable: invariably we mourn the loss of good things: good health, good friends, lovers, family, and all those elements that make life here on earth most enjoyable and worthwhile. It is certainly not wrong to mourn such things and it would be unhealthy not to do so.

Yet a great many more of the negative emotions we experience fall much more in our own laps. We are entirely capable of taking wounds�real or imagined�and nursing them, along with grudges and a host of other toxins that quickly reduce us to our lowest selves if left unchecked. These feelings are almost exclusively the product of our own thought processes and have little to do with the outward environment at all, save how we choose to respond to it. Put another way, these factors have very little to do with sensation and a great deal to do with perception, where sensation refers to the data that streams into our sensorium and our perception to the the interpretation we supply it. We could fairly say, then, that many of our negative emotions�loneliness, depression, boredom, anger, hostility�stem from our response to the world, at least during those times we are not grieving the loss of health or loved ones. That much we have heard before and can be summarized quite beautifully in the classic Serenity Prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

What we do not hear so often, however, is that in a very similar manner, contentment is also an “inside job.� It is the human tendency to think “if only I had this person or thing, then I would be contented.� But again, contentment is an inside job: it is not located in the external world but inside our own perceptions. The Apostle reminds us of the same in Philippians 4:11–13 when he speaks of learning the secret of being contented in all things: he has discovered it is not a matter of what we have, but Who. The Apostle again instructs the Corinthians in the second epistle to take their thoughts captive, subjecting each one to the obedience of Christ (10:5).

We have heard all these things before, most of us. Many of us have sat under sermons that seemed to delight in beating us over the head, reminding us how naughty and sinful and awful and dismal and small and unfortunate and pathetic and failing and unworthy and ungrateful and blackened and twisted creatures we are. And, after enough such sermons, we have stopped listening. No one can blame us, really: such things ring with a level of inauthenticity�they smack of someone who has himself or herself forgotten what is it to live life in the trenches. But we also should not walk away from the truth of such apostolic admonitions like learning the secret of contentment or taking captive our thoughts, no matter how trite and tiresome they begin to seem, our familiarity breeding undue contempt. In fact, often the simplest truths are the very ones we most need to hear, if possible with fresh ears and a fresh heart, unworthy creatures, yes, but penitent too and filled with hope which in its season yields joy.

When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed,

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,

Count your many blessings, name them one by one,

And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.