Happiness…we orchestrate our lives around finding it, yet it’s like grasping oil through fingers.
Why is it so hard to find? “I’ll be happy when…”
Because contentment, the thing we’re really wanting, is NOT found in our circumstances. Happiness is not a better something, more of something, or a different something. We immerse ourselves in the search for that “something” that doesn’t exist to make us happy.
Happiness is finding peace wherever we are.
We tend to view hardship, loss and waiting as surprising elements of life. We avoid them at all cost (this is natural, of course) and maintain that we could never find happiness there.
The reality is that hardship, loss and waiting are every much a part of life as prosperity, gain and “arriving”.
Life is made up of all these things and contentment is found when we rest in His knowing, His love and His goodness in ordaining whatever comes to pass.
I’m writing this to myself, learning hard–in this place–what true contentment is. It feels like I could be really content when there is more quiet spaces in our home, more room to put our clothes, more shelves for organizing our things, more sleep, more security for my husband’s future work, more counter space on which to cook…
My storm really began after the tornado. The battle for inner calm amid chaos and uncertainty. It brews even now, in the daily challenges to keep this home, to solve the dilemmas waiting each morning, to find contentment in the world that defied my best efforts to keep it constant and unchanging.
And then we all lose perspective, don’t we? Our “problems” so petty compared to others’.
Life is changing. Life is sometimes good and sometimes not. God loves us all the same and promises, not to orchestrate each detail to make us more comfortable, but to be sufficient in every place.
Learning from a tubless bathroom shared by eleven people 😉
