Contentment

 I was with two of my daughters waiting on my carpool to pick up one before I took the other one to school. While we were waiting my youngest took her sister’s rolling backpack and began to walk in a large circle on the driveway. Halfway through this, the carpool showed up, Lucy grabbed her backpack jumped in the car and took off. My youngest was devastated. She wanted to finish the circle. Her sister had snatched the backpack and took off before she had a chance to finish and this was a big deal to her.

As we drove to school, I tried to calm her down. We talked about letting things go, and forgiveness and we prayed. But she was still upset.  I said “Gwen, you are going to have to figure out how to turn this around so you can walk into school feeling better.” 

She looked at me and said, “I’m the only one who can make myself feel better, and myself doesn’t want to feel better.”

And I got it. Immediately, I got it. Because I have been there. I can totally relate to that.

 If I feel better, that means, that it wasn’t really a big deal.

Or that my feelings don’t matter.

Or I was wrong and they were right.

We don’t want to let go of our problem. We want to sit with it. If you picture your problem like a big wolf that’s pacing around your yard. We want to keep our eyes on the problem. We want to call up our best friend, or our mom and analyze the problem. We talk about the claws of the wolf, and the teeth. We google the wolf and find horror stories of the viscous creature and the lives that were destroyed by it. And fear sets in. We stop sleeping. We get up in the night and look out the window at the wolf. We spend time and resources, or we buy books about getting rid of the wolf. We spiral.

And during all of that, our family suffers. Our quality of life suffers. We haven’t solved anything we’ve just lived in a state of discontent and fear.

I recently did a bible study on psalms. They broke the psalms down into different categories, like hymns, thanksgiving, and wisdom. One of the types is Lament Psalms. These are the woe is me Psalms, the my problem is huge psalms.  These psalms follow a pattern. They start with Pain, go to Prayer and end with Praise.

When we face a problem, we have to try to follow this pattern. We can lament the problem, we can woe is me and sit in it. But we can’t stay there. Contentment comes when we chose to pray and choose to praise. When we pray we close our eyes and take our focus off the problem. When we praise we remember who God is and His power over our problem. It doesn’t mean God immediately changes anything. Or that the scars and pain of the problem are erased. But it does allow us to find contentment and peace despite the problem. We will all face wolves. This world is full of them but we don’t have to give them our contentment.