Choosing Contentment

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

“You work in pest control? I bet you have some interesting tales to tell!” Her comment snagged my entire table’s attention. Apparently, everyone loves pest control horror stories, and the conversational floodgates on that topic had been thrown wide open.

I was in Southern California, the only Minnesotan among a table of locals, and I grew a bit green around the gills as I listened to stories of venomous and poisonous critters in backyards and basements. Ready for a conversation change, I asked one table companion— a transplant from the Midwest and a fellow gardener—about her SoCal garden and some of the plants I’d been desperately wishing would grow in my Zone 3a yard. But her response cast those flowers in a different light. Those gorgeous bougainvillea vines I’d been sighing over all week? Filled with thorns so prickly and painful that pruning was a carefully undertaken task. And the jasmine hedgerows I’d fallen head over heels in love with at the botanical garden? Water hogs requiring too much moisture in a drought-ridden landscape.

Our conversation wasn’t all gloom and doom, but her honesty about the realities of gardening in San Diego’s sunny Zone 10 as compared to her colder Midwestern experience was exactly what I needed to hear. There is something to be said for living in a place where it gets so cold that your nostrils freeze together. The trade-off for frigid winter temps is that I don’t worry about shaking an occasional scorpion out of my shoe.

In a world filled with photoshopped images and curated social media posts, contentment is elusive. Someone said, “The grass is greener where you water it.” I’ve taken that statement to heart. Longing for the illusion of what someone else has rarely accounts for the realities of what they face. And if you knew the hidden costs and downsides, what they have wouldn’t be nearly as alluring.

Cultivating contentment bolsters gratefulness. We do this by understanding that the glossy facade others present, intentionally or not, isn’t the whole truth, and by anchoring our hope in Jesus, viewing our circumstances through the lens of faith.

Julie

Today’s Act of Gratitude

What illusions have you been believing as truth? How might you replace longing with contentment in these circumstances?