Contentment versus Discontent: Part Deux

I've been reflecting further on the nature of contentment, and how to get there from the land of discontent, and I've come up with the following.  I'm sure my "solution," if you can call it such, since I guarantee it's a battle I'll fight repeatedly my whole life long, is nothing new or particularly inventive.  But as I've been able to find a small measure of peace through a change in attitude and practices,  I thought I'd share, since you were all so kind as to comment, offer suggestions, and mostly just empathize with the feeling of not being quite where you want.

First - the back story, part one, can be found here:

Not wanting to wallow all Fall in a bog of disappointment, disillusionment, and discouragement (oh, those nasty "dis" words), I've adopted a three pronged approach that seems to be offering some measure of consolation:

1) Re-examine and remind myself of all the blessings and provision that God *has* provided, in His good time.  These blessings have been either gratuitous, in that we didn't need them but were very happy to receive just the same, or utterly fortuitous, because we really needed His provision to come through, and it did.  The list gets long when I really stop and think about it - a loving (and humorous) husband, a beautiful daughter, good jobs for both of us that have allowed us to have a lot of flexibility, and have allowed me to be home with our daughter; families that love us; good educations, great friends both near and far.  Everything that we have needed, He has provided, with a goodly measure of non-needs at the same time.  Part of step one is also realizing that this very apartment, that we want to move out of, is among the many blessings we have received.  Indeed, the fact that the oil furnace broke, necessitating replacement, and more importantly prompting our landlord to replace our expensive electric water heater with (cheaper) on demand hot water is proof that God is watching out for us, even when it isn't necessarily what we're wanting.

In this same vein, I've examined why exactly we want a house so badly, and whether it is currently a want, or a need, and have found that it is still truly the former.  Our current apartment, while small, is fine for a family of three with the newest member still co-sleeping in our bed.  We do have a second bedroom, even, that can be converted to LW's room if we end up here for a goodly length more time.  It would be tight with two little ones, but not as tight as my parents made do with when we were small (a single-wide trailer with an addition, until I was five, while my dad was building our house).  We'd like a house because financially it makes more sense long term; because we'd like a place to sink our roots and really call home; because we'd like a yard, and the ability to grow much more of our food.  But for the time being, a want it is.

2) Examine what is "lacking" in our current living space, and address it, where financially feasible.  When we moved into our apartment, we didn't know for how long it was going to be; we were hoping to buy a house once our one-year lease expired.  We've now been here well over two years, and some of the assumptions that we made going into it have proven false.  For instance, we've chose to make do with the old $40 carpet I'd bought at Staples for a former apartment, figuring it didn't make sense to buy something nicer.  We made do with a cardboard box at first for a DVD stand, until our landlord kindly donated his old one when he purchased a bigger TV.  Fortunately, I did yield to Jim's better judgment in the matter of blinds and shades for the windows - if it had been up to me, I probably would have done without, figuring "we're not going to be here for long."  But in the meantime, this attitude has made us unconsciously act as though this isn't really our home - and has thus increased our feeling of discontentment with where we're at.

So, I've been looking around our home, and seeing the places where we could make it a little bit more homey.  Some of these touches are small - I'm planning to make a nice shower curtain, and some new curtains for our kitchen.  Some are bigger - it really is time to get a new rug for our living room at the least, and perhaps the bedroom as well.  We'd love to get a small flat screen TV that could hang on the wall and free up more floor space (as well as keeping the buttons out of the reach of inquisitive fingers - our current model, a TV I bought back when I was still a teenager, has had to be retrofitted with a cardboard panel taped over the buttons).  However that is a much bigger purchase, and requires a lot more evaluation.  The key, as far as I'm concerned, is mostly small additions that can eventually carry over to the house we buy when the timing is right.

It isn't all purchases, either: we've been very much living, the last few months especially, as though we were going to move.  This has meant not bothering to keep some small areas of our house (cupboards, closets) tidy.  Today I went through and attacked as many "culch" areas as I could, and the house really does feel better for it.  I'll go through the kitchen cabinets sometime soon as well.

3) Finally, realize that the feeling of want that I'm experiencing is really about something deeper, and even finding that perfect house wouldn't actually assuage it.  C.S. Lewis says it best, in The Weight of Glory: 

 "If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy,"

and also,

"The books or the music [or house!] in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I've been forced to learn this lesson repeatedly in the past, especially when longing for a romantic relationship that was yet to be, or nostalgically missing a person or place from the past.  The real longing is for the joy those people or places, or that desired relationship, did or would bring into my life; joy that is a foretaste of heaven, but that exists only in so far as I keep seeking heaven, and don't seek those things in themselves.  When I've gone back to those places looking for that same joy, I find exactly what Lewis says: it is not there.  In the past, I've counseled myself to remember that what I'm really longing for is heaven, and to therefore seek God with all my heart in order to one day experience the real fulfillment of that want.  So really, that is the be all, end all, cure to wanting a house: to realize that I'm not really wanting an earthly house, so much as my heavenly home.  And in the meantime, to accept God's daily provision, and trust that He'll provide a bigger space, and earth to sink our roots into, when the time really is right.

My apologies for the LONG post, but I really wanted to share :)

Contentment versus Discontent

I don't have time for a long post at the moment, but this is something I've been struggling with lately (OK, maybe I've been struggling with it my whole life?):  how to be content in the moment, content with God's provision for Right Now rather than looking to the future or the past for something that isn't Right Now.

At the moment, the "want" that is currently unfulfilled is that of a house to call our own; we've been looking and looking, and are finally coming to the conclusion that we may need to put the search on hold for the time being, because financially it just doesn't feel like the right moment. With LW's tooth problems, there may be some big medical expenses coming up, and it was a financially rough summer with lots of weddings, miscellaneous car repairs, and random (yet somehow large ticket) other items that had to be taken care of.   We probably could swing it, but I've found myself riddled with doubt, anxiety, and an extreme lack of peace about the decision, all good indications that the way has not yet been opened for us to move forward.  I feel more at peace in one sense about waiting, but at the same time, waiting leaves me in an uncomfortable place of unfulfilled "want".

However, it's not the first, or doubtless the last, "want" that I'll experience.  For a long time, it was a relationship; then engagement, marriage, a child.  Of course, right now I'd love to go back and be in one of those places of "want" again instead, because I can now see how He provided those blessings all in good time.  He is ever faithful, and in the same manner, I know He'll provide a place to really call our own when the time is right - yet this doesn't stop me from looking longingly at what others have, even jealously and oftentimes bitterly at the means that He's given others to live with, and to live just a bit more easily than we do.

And yet, when I really stop and look at it, I can see how, like the manna in the desert, He has been providing everything we need, right when we needed it.  Perhaps He's working on teaching us to trust a bit more, and the house will come along when we really need it, when we begin splitting the seams of this apartment rather than when we're mostly wistfully thinking of all the perks of home ownership.

I guess it just comes down to trusting the Hand that is leading us, even when the way is dark.  I feel like I've lived through this lesson over, and over, and over again in the last several years, but there must be some purpose still left in it; who was it that said, "You learn more from climbing the same mountain a hundred times, than from climbing a hundred different mountains?"

When I stop and really look at how I'm feeling, too, I begin to feel really guilty for feeling discontent.  So many in the world go without nearly all the creature comforts that I enjoy, so how dare I feel bad because we can't buy a house, or because money is tight?  After all, money doesn't determine happiness. And we are happy, taking joy in the growth of our little girl, in our marriage, in family, friends, the beautiful state we live in, and all sorts of non-money related little pursuits.  Still, the itch is there - the itch for more, better, to have something that I currently don't have.  Consumerism lives deep within, hard as I may try to weed it out.

Ironically, the best way that I've found to deal with this particular itch is a two-pronged approach of focusing on the real, concrete blessings that God has bestowed (and how providentially He has provided every step of the way), while at the same time practicing a bit of detachment - getting rid of things I've been holding on to, and denying myself in little ways to restore my focus on where I should be storing my treasure up.  It's a dual watering/pruning approach, and it does work, but still growth comes slowly, grudgingly, like roots through concrete.

Anyone else experience these sorts of feelings?  Any practical advice for learning patience when it comes to things like houses and finances?  I find that I can so quickly fall from discontentment to outright discouragement, because it so often seems like some of the dreams I have are years away, if they indeed will ever be realized.  Then again, this very week three years ago, I never could have guessed that marriage and baby were literally only months away.  I've experienced the darkness before the dawn enough to know that quite often, when I start feeling like this, good things are just around the corner, if only I can be patient enough to allow them to unfold.

Ups, Downs, and All Arounds..

My apologies for being so "quiet" lately.  Life has been crazy - sometimes crazy good, sometimes crazy bad, and it's been hard to find a moment to do laundry (hence three loads are sitting on my basement floor) much less sit down to construct a coherent post.

First, the "down":  I had to take my 13 month old to the dentist yesterday.  Jim and I used to joke years ago that if we ever got married, our kids would be doomed - we both had so many problems with cavities and such - and evidently (dentally?) it's not so much of a joke when it actually happens. LW has two cavities behind her front middle teeth, and now it's a race to try and find a second opinion as far as what to do about them.  Dentist #1 was brusque, uninformative, performed a sealing procedure without asking or explaining first, and is insisting that we night wean (and preferably stop feeding on demand in the daytime as well).  Of course, as I know from previous experience, dentists really would be most happy if they could get all their patients to be fed via stomach tube and never have anything touch their teeth...  Anyway, that is the current crisis of our days.  I really don't want to night wean her yet, as she's still nursing 3-4 times a night, receives quite a lot of calories that way, and it gets us all the maximum amount of shut-eye.  SO.. prayers, please, for healing and also for us to find a decent dentist who is willing to work with the whole baby, not just focusing exclusively on her teeth (side note - this has been a bad year for this particular topic; we had to shell $2500 out of pocket in March when Jim had a dental abscess, so this came as a particularly annoying blow).

The literal "up": LW is standing up on her own (as in, in the middle of the floor, without anything to pull up on), and taking a few steps from there!  Her toddle-waddle is one of the cutest things I've ever seen.  She is pushing "further up and further in," in the form of climbing everything (chairs, couches, people) in sight.  She's also beginning to master more words (like "bath"), and every day becomes more like a little toddler-person rather than a baby.

Also literally "up": the garden is entering into its full glory:

  We recently harvested the first of the tomatoes and peas:

They are *super* tasty.  I had forgotten how good a cherry tomato or snap pea straight off the vine can taste.  My buds have gotten used to the bland store bought stuff.

The peas are actually kind of funny, because when we left for 4th of July weekend, there was one bud about to bloom; when we returned, the whole tops of the bushes were covered, and the next morning, there were full pea pods waiting to be harvested.

This might, of course, have something to do with the "all around": the all encompassing heat wave we've been experiencing.  Remember this post?  It's even hotter than that now, and ridiculously high humidity levels as well.  Yesterday, I gave in, and let Jim put the AC in the bedroom window (being mistress of frugality, it has to be seriously hot for me to allow the use of the AC).  It was worth it, though, for the three of us to actually get a good night's sleep.

In one other piece of "all around" news - our BG's are working great!  She hasn't been any redder than she ever was in the disposables in weeks, and we've got a good wash/dry routine down.  The only problem is that with this hot weather, she's been running around in her diaper, and has now figured out how to open the Velcro tabs.  I'm super excited about not spending all that $$ on the disposables anymore (although, technically, it'll take 6+ months to recoup the investment in the BG's).  We're still using one sposie at night - any suggestions for good overnight solutions?  She might be OK overnight, I just haven't dared risk it yet.  That being said, she pretty routinely leaks out of the disposable at night anyway...

Oh, and the other "up" piece of news: we're looking at a house that we actually really like, which might even be in our price range!  5.5 acres of a land, an older farmhouse that needs some renovations but would be livable until we were able to do so, and only about 30 min from where Jim works (not ideal, but better than it could be).  God willing, we're hoping to move on to the house inspector step, after taking one more look at it.

Now... time for that laundry :)