Reminiscence While (Finally) Taking Down the Christmas Decorations

If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content.

Godliness with contentment is great gain.

Better is a dish of vegetables where love is than a fattened ox served with hatred.

Make sure your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have, for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you nor will I ever forsake you.”

(1 Timothy 6:8 NASB, 1 Timothy 6:6 KJV, Proverbs 15:17 NASB, Hebrews 13:5 NASB)

For many years I subscribed to these Scripture verses with the same attitude I showed for the fourfold adage Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Or do without!

Those years were a little on the lean side, and I made it a point of honor to man up to the challenge.  If I couldn’t grow it or make it, I didn’t need it.  I was a stay-at-home Mom by choice, and by golly, I was not among the softies who couldn’t learn to do without!

But my contentment was often bundled up in a smug conception of how resilient/creative/humble/ resourceful/strong/clear-sighted I was.  I managed to bend away from the world’s material values right back toward my own proud flesh.  (How appropriate Luther’s definition of sin:  mankind curved in on itself.)

Oh thank God for growing in grace!  Along the Way (and over a space of many years—decades, in fact) I have learned that contentment is not so much a battle to be fought as it is eyes to be opened.  After all, as Hebrews 13:5 says, the one unfailing blessing that can crown each second with contentment is the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.  By Him and with Him I can know He has perfectly designed the details of the moment. 

It is He that provides joys for the taking—the everyday bliss of babies and poems and candlelight.  It is He that provides peace in misery, the buoyant hope that there will not always be darkness/pain/emptiness/sin.  It is He that, over the long haul, becomes the Companion, Confidante, Friend, Whose presence transforms a prosaic concept like “contentment” into a quest to Seize the Day.

His fruit is love and joy.  Not just making do.