Contentment

           

Contentment. This word, contained in I Timothy 6:6, made me pause for a moment. Maybe one reason it did so is that the word is rare in the New Testament. It made me think of a few movies. I thought of the message of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. A less well-known move is Mr. Destiny (1990). Larry is a man having a very bad day, ending with the boss firing him. Financially, he and his family struggled. He did not know what he was going to do. His car breaks down. He enters a mysterious bar. He starts telling the bartender that his life would have been so different and better if only he had hit the pitch in the big baseball game when he was in high school. Well, the bartender has the power to change what happened, so he receives a look at how his life would have been different had he hit the pitch. The big change in his new life was that he did not marry his wife in his other life. However, in his new life, he eventually meets her and convinces her that they had been married in another life. At the end of the day, she says to him, “Larry, if we had such a great life together, why did you want it changed?” Larry says, “I guess I just didn’t know what I had.”

            Contentment is a virtue like that. It invites us to appreciate the life we have. This virtue reminds us of how easy it can be to look upon our lives with a sense of dissatisfaction and discontent. We could always have done something better. We hear the “you should have” in our heads. I suppose most of us want to be happy, healthy, and at least moderately wealthy. Human beings are that way. We want more of each as well, which is also quite human. I know some people who are so content they have become lazy. I am not talking about that. The proper application of the virtue of contentment is simple. We appreciate what we have. We are thankful to God for the blessings of life.