A Thought On Contentment.

Are you content?

That is a question that you can answer truthfully and in the safety of your own head. Your friends, or husband or wife or whoever can’t look over your shoulder and peer into your mind and see your answer. I think that a lot of us might answer that question with a conditional response, such as… ” I was content before this happened or this happened”; or ” I will be content once I finish this, get this promotion or move here”.

Contentment. Is that not what we all seek in this life? If you were to think honestly to yourself, would the ultimate pursuit of the vast majority of all your actions not be the great and mighty climactic arrival at the summit of contentment? I’m not writing to say that it is, I’m just asking a question.

My honest answer for a long time has been… that yes, in retrospect, I was content. However, the more I truly think about that answer the more I realize that I am only calling to mind moments of happiness, moments of pure joy that have superiorly imposed themselves in the natural flowing order of my memory above the true discontentment (whether it was great or small) at the time. Much like the mind of a survivor of a traumatic event has repressed true events, though in my case not nearly so severe, just conceptually similar.

In my pure gut response I also answer that yes, I will be content, once I finally get the job of my dreams, and the house in the country with land and so on and so forth. However, if I were to think about the times in past when I told myself the very same thing, that once I arrive at the current state I am now, I will be, finally content, but am I really content now? If I do not realize that I have told myself this without ever arriving at the ultimate goal I have so tediously sought out, then I am living out two old sayings, from whomever it has been derived … “Those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it” and “insanity is… doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results”. It’s the cycle of insanity.

There are what I believe two separate schools of thought, the first being… That man can find true long-lasting contentment in the things produced and sought out in this world whether it be in family, career, house, car, and etc. Then there is the school of thought, that true long-lasting contentment can be found in some external source from outside this world, realm or dimension via the everlasting God, the creator of all things. I am of the latter belief, believing so mostly because I, personally have found (been taught) that the former can not be, since it is cyclical, repeating, only continually promising what it is has failed to produce. Now that is not to say that the former cannot, for some, bring long-lasting contentment, and for those people I am truly afraid. I am afraid because those people have failed to seek out a higher truth, because the lacking discontentment has altered their seeking of that which is better. C.S Lewis will state what I simply cannot…

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Maybe you’re not supposed to be content with perishable things of this world, maybe discontentment is the true beauty, the catalyst that propels you into some far grander than your mud pies in a slum.

Think Much on Death

The late, great Jonathan Edwards, a brilliant intellectual, theologian and shining instrument in the Great Awakening formulated a  list of 70 resolutions to live by. Number 9 on that list of resolutions is the resolution “to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death”. A resolution some might consider rather morbid, mostly because the world we live in has made the concept of dwelling on your own mortality somewhat taboo. The very thought, stands uncontested as extremely counterintuitive, does it not? Nothing about most people’s daily thoughts and actions circle around their own mortality, you move swiftly through this world with everything inside you telling you that you will see no end; and it is our very nature to do so. It’s as if your very soul knows more of something eternal than the natural laws that foretell our fleshly fate, but that is a topic well reserved for another day of thought. For those who adore statistics, they are not good for those who long to live forever, but that doesn’t come to mind unless reminded or deliberately called to mind.

All the theories and philosophies on death and life after death, which many are formulated from speculation, possibilities, too strict an adherence to logic, and chance. Now sitting on a deathbed with a sound mind, and knowing that your time is near one might resolve to scramble for sound, concrete answers and solutions, And preceding your death you may have that opportunity to dwell on the forthcoming issue at hand. But what happens when in an instant your sliding head first into a suddenly overturned 18 wheeler on the highway, the sudden terror of your brakes maxed to floor, the inefficient amount of friction as you plead to the rubber on your screaming tires as they scratch and claw at the pavement to save your life. When, in that momentary flash your heart doesn’t even have to time be influenced by the dump of epinephrine into your veins and you know a collision is unavoidable, and the worst part is the last thought that goes through your head as you realize you have no choice but to hit the vehicle in front of you is ”I hope this doesn’t hurt”. You blew your last thought on that. Sure didn’t have much time to dwell deeply on the fact that you may die. Think and dwell deeply on that fact you are going to die and do it often. Yes, while dwelling on your own mortality may be morbid, not doing so doesn’t change the fact that you are going to die. The amount of power you have over your own death is extremely limited, if it weren’t do you not think there would be a lot more people around today?

Jonathan Edward’s preceding number seven resolution…

“Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life”.

More Immortal, Even Than The Stars

“Something there is more immortal even than the stars…”

                                                       -Walt Whitman

I remember taking this photo, I remember it almost as vividly as I can see my hands move now sitting at this computer typing this very sentence. I remember it being almost real, in that very second sitting on a largely, abandoned and extremely rarely touched formation of boulders that jutted out into this mountain lake in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. I am still unable, and completely baffled by my inability to see that which, at that very instant, in all its majestic, untamed and overflowing beauty could be so unreal, so unattainable, so untouchable and in its ethereal magnificence, so above every ounce of reproach. It was right there in front of my face; my eyes were fully fixated on such a landscape, a landscape that for the most part will probably be one of the most beautiful sights my eyes have ever and will ever see on this earth. I just wanted to touch it, to fly up into that sight and just be closer, be apart of it, to go deeper in. It was, in that moment, for me, abounding outside of its adherence to earthly laws of nature and its finite bounds, completely eternal.

I remember being so confused. I remember thinking how could any man, sitting in my position, on that remote mountain lake, not be content. One would think, and I am still completely unable to fathom, how I could not be content, just for that moment; but everything in my flesh was begging for more. I craved more, something even more epic, something ever grander, and more majestic! But every functioning molecule inside me was pleading, screaming for more! MORE! In retrospect, I ask my self more? Seriously?

Deep down I knew though, it was futility, subjected futility. For as Paul states in the book of Romans…   

“For the creation has been subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

I, in my flesh am bound to a world of boundaries, I am stuck in a finite existence, and with the deepest dwelling in me, this world is completely contradictory to me. That even in that moment of such beauty and grandeur, I needed more. That need, in my deepest dwellings, thought for so long to be a horrible curse, is my finest blessing. I know that me being content in this world, will only last as long as my pulse. So praise God for discontentment in that and so many more moments. For in that eternal, immortal longing I have found a discontentment and void much too grand for any majestic landscape.

Futility and Beauty

For the vast majority of my life I have, with the fairest of ignorance, chased head strong, the fullness of contentment, only to find the object of my pursuit expounding in the fullness of disappointment. Yet the greatest of mystery lied in my failure to see the patterns formed from the propensity of my unyielding desire to produce the blissful contentment I sought as paramount. It was only in my allegiance to the deceptions of linear progression that I failed to see my bondage to the perpetual cycle found in all things.

22 years, though it may be not long, was long enough for me to find that my sanity was slipping with every step I took towards a pursuit of contentment. I would find myself finally arriving at the place, where the contentment in joy powerful enough to cease my searching forever, was to be found; only to find that it was once again just out of arms reach, gloating in its elusive power to outwit all my plots and schemes of its capture, and this I found everywhere. But where sanity begins to dance with madness is that while standing on the exact spot where fullness was to be found I believed that fullness must be elsewhere; and in my pursuit of elsewhere I invited momentum to the sickening cycle of frustration, centrifugally slinging outwards the remains of my sanity.

What I speak of is that subconsciously I would tell myself that getting to a point whether it be getting this or that, or moving here or there or doing this or that would finally allow happiness to be tattooed in, permanent, captured, subdued, yet it was never there to be obtained. This I call futility.

Futility is nations and governments pursuing better societies and abounding in freedoms and power, clawing closer and closer to the utopian mindset; but nations and government systems in all their glory fall, just as all have fallen before them. Workout programs, diets and medicine only prolong the inevitability of death. Monetary gain and building the empire of careers and legacies fail when your money is divided and you are soon forgotten after you are gone. The pursuit of storybook ideal lifestyles lacking in the attributes your dreams promised you. Disappointment destroys us, weakening all that we have left to believe in.

I began to realize that the presence of this futility was frustrating the whole of the world, that even the “greatest” minds in all of history were fully aware of its presence. Philosophers expounded on the attributes of the problem and presented utopian like solutions for the problems at hand, only ignorantly adding the deceptive word- progression to a cycle which never gains, just allows the redundancy of spinning in circles to be defined as a measure of achievement, about as brilliant as putting out a fire with a forest of lumber. There were no answers to obtaining the elusive contentment.

But one day the cycle slowed and dizziness from the momentum lessened and I found something worthy of note.

King Solomon, historically one of the wealthiest, and most wise (if that could be measured) rulers of all time gives me understanding to such a dilemma. King Solomon invested himself in pursuing the fullness of life, being fully capable of doing so he acquires wisdom surpassing all before him, he has ecstasy filled parties, builds historical palaces, forests and temples, has 700 wives and 300 concubines, has riches great enough to be worthless to him. He states “And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them”, but from all of this he states over and over “All is vanity [meaningless, futile] and a striving after the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun”. He obtains and achieves more than I could ever imagine and he states that it is all meaningless. He absolutely seals off and confirms the  cycle that I was trapped in.

He states later in Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. Also he has put eternity into mans heart, yet so that he cannot find out what has been done from the beginning to the end.”

That combined with this excerpt from Romans has absolutely ruined me “For the creation has been subjected to futility not willingly but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

And therein lied the answers, that contentment, fullness of joy, lasting happiness which I sought after so tediously was not to be obtained on this earth. I concluded that when eternity is placed within the deepest weavings of my existence, futility arises when it is bound to finite, when death exists when we want to live, when the joy that we obtain doesn’t last and sorrow is lurking just around the next corner, and things don’t produce that which our deepest desires arriving out of us tells them to. That is futility, and God subjected us to it and it is beautiful; because the unending joy we seek lies not in this creation, not in this world but in Him, we were given this so that we might seek after Him, the creator and possessor of contentment. In heaven in all its glory, where time has no reign and forever expounds on forever, contentment is never sought after because contentment has never left.

So one day you arrive at the outskirts of futility where the compliments of happiness only trickle drops into a bottomless pale, where frivolity is paid in wages and the logician expounds on the exemplary grandiosity of linear progression declaring its independence from centripetal bondage, only to find two points connected by a line drawn diametrically across the very circle it meant to escape.

But Christ arrives with two lines pushing into eternity intersecting at the heart of the circle to deform the shape that holds us prisoner, breaking the cycle of mortality and bondage to finite, with roads leading out into forever.

The Present Power

 

In my life I have come to believe that a day is simply a day, it is a square on a calendar that lies perfectly adjacent to other squares of exact sameness in shape and size. I have believed for so long that day is a word that means one thing and one thing only, a mere 24 hours at to which by laying my head on a pillow and closing my eyes I shall know of another 24 hours when they open again. In logic it is as simple as kindergarten: 60 seconds = 1 minute, 60 minutes = 1 hour, 24 hours = 1 day. This is wrong not so much in logic, but rather that in horrid and mundane education we have taken this basic equation as an application to life rather than respecting it for being simple logic.

All my life I have heard the saying “every new day is a gift from God”, and in all honesty I have just never been there; because bad days are usually not days you feel like writing a thank you card to God. Even in my most desperate attempts to transform all that is bad to that which is good I have faced futility. I have stood dumbfounded in awe at the sold out optimist arising humbly out of Gods creation, whom I have always envied; who stands kneeling over a bad day or a bad week or a bad year in triumph, smiling and saying “its been good.”

As perilously as I have slaved, I have forever come home empty handed from my exhaustive attempts at transforming the bad to the good; and there I came upon the realization that good stands eternally untreatied with bad. That both good and bad are utterly independent of each other, standing distanced by their rivaling polarity, like pillars of stone inexorable in their nature; that the concrete nature of bad is not governed by me or my ability to change it to good.

And the greatest error I found in all these things is that it is not whether a day is good or bad but rather that the field I have been playing on has been subjected to a set of rules that I have always been free from, rules that fail to exemplify the power in the present. I have forgotten that the few fleeting seconds before the arrival of the future are mine, they are the present; and that whether good or bad they serve no day but expound in the richness that is now.

More Than Happiness

I have begun to reflect on the morbid hostility hiding its full potential for devastation in the misguided concept that God’s ultimate end for our life on this earth is to make us happy. Retrospectively in my life, the unfolding vanity of this mutated truth has been the catalyst responsible for the most destructive desires of rage, pouring out towards the very God who was supposed to make me happy.

Half a decade with a self-destructive rage, unraveling the sinews of my soul like thread from a spool, truth has disarmed the incendiary. With the hesitancy of a rebel to lay down his last weapon, I surrendered to the indisputable power of a God too loving to allow happiness to be the barter for my soul.  

I came to the understanding that God pursues the soul with no allegiance pledged solely to happiness, that our life is not about happiness, no matter how desperately we want it. And I was brought to the floor when I came upon the realization that Christianity or any service to God was in no way a fortress to which I was safe from the inevitability of pain, sorrow, grief, rage, death, or sadness; but only in the kingdom prepared for me will I find safety in such a fortress.

In the vexing presence of unceasing misery I began to ask the question what do I have to do to make sure this present state doesn’t last forever? And I realized I was staring depravity and mortality in the face, pleading for escape, and finally understood; that there is a place where the broken are repaired and the pain is no more just not here and not now but soon and very soon.

God does want you happy but he wants your heart more and he will dispose of happiness to get you.

Christ has conquered all things, and even happiness and sadness lay subdued at his feet, all for love.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Romans 8:35-37″

The All for All

Amidst the tumbling entanglement of light-speed information and allegiance to truth that woos the hearts and minds of the 21st century, various obscurities continue to hold rank in the light of central truth. I stand utterly enraged and heart broken, as a former loyalist to the obscurities who has found through the cloud of smoke the truth to which all lie subordinate.

The concept of a loving God has been subjected to the flavorless, half-hearted definition that proponents of today’s society have allowed perversion. We, generally speaking, seem to be enamored by the term love as some sort of kindness and smiley faced pleasure but as C.S Lewis states “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness”. It appears no great accomplishment to understand that a kind god will fail you. If we continue to look at God as if he were there were to convenience our every beckoning cry, and be our almighty butler who intercedes divinely to correct all things that are displeasing to us, then disappointment will be devastating, as it often is.

 A shocking truth is that God needs nothing from me or any of creation! God is not dependant on creation to be satisfied, He is all, and is supremely satisfied in himself. Only out of an overflowing waterfall of God’s own perfect nature, He gave birth to creation; a silly, half-hearted, miserable mess of a creature who invests in frivolous musings as its supreme means of delight. Out of his perfect righteousness could God not destroy all of us and be perfectly glorified in our punishment?” Would God’s glory not abound in his righteous wrath on all creation? Deuteronomy 28:63 states “And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you”.  But rather he humbled himself to man and gave his life for our life that we might become His righteousness. Look at a president of a great nation and tell me he how heavily he is guarded, tell me how it is a patriots duty to lay down his life for that of the president’s; quite paradoxical to that of the true King, is it not?

So here’s the thing, we continue to be caught in this cycle of gazing upon man’s failing nature to bring a drop of light upon the truth, which in reality basks unceasingly in the rays of a sun that refuses to set. What I mean is that Christ is all, not a pastor, not a church, not a denomination, not any organization affiliated with Christianity. If you set your sights upon any of those things for salvation then your great strike to hit is but a miss. The picture that is painted of Christianity is but a finger painting to the glorious strokes on the canvas that is the masterpiece of Christ.

You see Ephesians 2:8-9 states “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast”. There is nothing left to be done, what we could not do for ourselves, Christ did. So when institutions within the Christian realm continually go back to “do this and don’t do this”, to being a “good person” they are but superfluous, secondary issues; we, being all of creation are not good, Christ is. That is why I find it so strange of a congregation who leaves the faith because a pastor who comes forth or is caught in an indwelling sin. While that is not okay, it is but a beautiful example of the Gospel, for grace has saved, not his sin that he buried from public view. Christians are sinners not sinless. It is not Christian vs Secular, Catholic Vs Protestant, Eastern Vs Western, Liberal Vs Conservative it is as Matt Chandler states so often, Us. We all draw our equality from the inevitability of death,  for ALL have fallen short. So arising out of this terrible rambling all I desire to say is…

Christ is all.