"If Only" - Learning The Art of Contentment

Dear  Friends,

I was at a typical gathering of church women. I asked a leading question to get the women talking. “What would make you more content than you are at this present time? Start your answers with ‘If only,’” I suggested.

 “If only I could live in a bigger house,” a middle-aged woman sighed. I could understand that. I remembered living in a really tiny house when Stuart and I were in youth ministry, and longing for more space. After all, the other youth workers seemed to have more space than we did, and they didn’t need it as much as we did! There I was, wanting the space in my home that others had in theirs. After all, we were going to use it for ministry.

 “If only I were as pretty as my sister,” responded another woman. I could certainly relate to that! I grew up in the shadow of a stunning sister. I remembered how fed up I was with all the boys wanting to get to know me so they could get to know her!

 “If only I had the chance to go to college,” still another chipped in. “All my siblings got to go but me.” I could understand. I never had the chance to go to Bible school.

 “I’d be happy if I could go skiing with the family like my brother and his kids do instead of only being able to afford to go camping,” added a young, upwardly mobile homemaker. Who of us has not grown envious hearing about the exotic vacations someone else takes!

 “If only I had a husband and family. I’d be content never to go anywhere!” a single girl said softly. And so it went on. It seemed each woman was urged on by another’s discontent.

I thought how easy it is to live our lives in the shadow of “if only.”

But it’s high time we realized that coveting is a sin! I realized that fact when I first read the Ten Commandments. There it was in black and white for all of us spoiled, discontented people to read. God has said loudly and clearly, “Do not covet.” Every time we break the commandment, God says, “And what part of ‘do not’ do you not understand? Even if we say “if only” silently in our hearts, God hears us loud and clear!

I grew up playing the “if only” game. Not growing up as a Christian, I had never read the Bible and didn’t know Jesus could satisfy me. I had this gnawing sense of discontent, and I assumed that it was because I had not found the person, thing, or situation that would satisfy me. So I played the “if only” game. It seemed I never got to the end of the game.

And then I found Christ!

Now, many of my “if onlys” have been answered. The Son of God walked into my heart, and the day dawned! How could I have lived in so much darkness and never known it? The day dawned and the birds sang and my world was changed!

Yet it wasn’t long after I had come to faith and the first euphoria passed that I began to hear the urgent “if only” voices again. How could I still be saying, “If only”? I felt more guilt than I had ever felt before I became a Christian. Christians aren’t supposed to be unsatisfied. They are not supposed to envy other Christians who appear to have all their “if onlys” satisfied. What was wrong with me?

Wanting what other have is a disease. What’s more, it’s catching! If you are around people who are never happy and are always grumbling, you’ll find yourself infected with the same “grumble germ.” Yet love is the medicine that cures the ailment.

Paul told the Corinthians that coveting was childish and dangerous behavior and they needed to grow out of it. He wrote, “Love is not jealous” (1 Cor. 13:4); “Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have” (The Message). Love loves God supremely and one’s neighbor as oneself. This is possible because we are satisfied with the Beloved alone.

Do you struggle with the monsters of jealousy and discontent? Do you feel you have never really found true satisfaction in this life whatever your circumstances? Have you ever asked yourself, is this all there is? And are you concerned about it? Good! Then we can hope that you will pursue the art of contentment. It can be learned.

Paul wrote that he had learned the secret of contentment, and the secret was Christ. “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 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. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”  Or in The Message:  “Actually, I don’t have a sense of needing anything personally. I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am” (The Message).

Paul said he had learned how to be content whether full or empty, happy or sad, abased or abounding. He wrote his epistle of joy from prison! We might be in the prison of a bad marriage, of a chronic illness, of a heartbreaking circumstance. We may feel we are shut up to old age, poverty, or ignorance. Whatever prison God has allowed in our lives, His love can flood that cell and bring peace, contentment, and even joy.

Bring your “if onlys” to God and let Him teach you the art of contentment. In learning the art of contentment, your “if onlys’” will disappear as you discover Christ as the content of your contentment.

In His Love,

Jill Briscoe

Executive Editor

Just Between Us Magazine

Lessons I Learned From Mom

Dear Friends,

My mother had asked us to call her Peggy from our early childhood days, perhaps anticipating the day she would lay aside her mother role for friendship’s garments. Peggy had been the first to know when we were expecting our first baby. Her beautiful dark brown eyes had lit up with joy and excitement, and she immediately began making her own preparations for the event. She told me that she wanted to be called “Nana” instead of grandmother, a name that conjured up in her mind too austere a picture and not the friend she was determined to be to our children, even as she had been to us.

I will never forget bringing David home. I thought of a prayer that Peggy had told me she prayed every day: “Oh, God make me a good mother.” I knelt by my bed and I prayed too – adding, “like Peggy.”

Most weekends in the summer while we were living in England, Father traveled up to the nearby Lake District with friends to fish for salmon. Sometimes he brought Mother and left her with me for the day. How I used to look forward to those special visits. As we chattered together, we would laugh all day as Peggy set the pace and made the humor, constantly poking fun at herself. We busied ourselves with diapers and cleaning and cooking and bed-making, keeping up an endless repartee of recollections.

One of the most basic lessons I learned from my mother was her sense of openness and honesty. She could never bear to harbor anything and had to “have it out” as soon as possible. She always had to tell us what was on her mind and clear the air. My sister practiced a similar philosophy. But for me, it was harder. Telling half the truth, resorting to a little white lie, or taking an “anything for peace” stance never seemed to do me any harm, but, whenever she could, Peggy pushed me into being truthful in my statements and actions. She encouraged me to put things right with people immediately. It took the Lord Jesus Christ to change me and begin to help me tell my feelings and failings openly and honestly with people.

Peggy always respected Shirley and me and “trusted us twice” – a skill mothers should cultivate. To trust once requires not much more than most can give, but to trust again when trust has been abused requires another quality of confidence altogether. That needs a belief in the child, a determination to think the best, and a confidence in God’s intervention when everyone believes the worst.

What marvelous trust God placed in us, I thought in awe. And what a risk He took! Fancy allowing us the chance to build eternal values into our children’s lives. God had given us the ability as parents to guide our own, and as far as Stuart and I were concerned, that meant guiding them into the way of Jesus. I realized it was this dimension that made a Christian mother different from just a mother. She had the grand ability to know God and make Him known to her child.

Yes, I could teach our children the Eternal’s ways, I thought excitedly. But there has to be the training of example to go along with it, I mused. The do-as-I-do that I had seen in Peggy’s life and that I could seek to emulate, and not just the do-as-I-say bit.

What lessons have you learned from your mother? If your mother is still alive, send her a letter or a card telling her one lesson you learned from her example. 

Happy Mother’s Day,

Jill Briscoe

Executive Editor

Just Between Us Magazine

Hanging Onto Hope

Dear Friends,

We need to hang on to hope.  It has been said, “You can’t be optimistic with misty optics; seeing what will be with the eyes of faith requires clear inner vision.”

Helen Keller, a woman who was both blind and deaf, was asked, “What can be worse than a person with no sight?”

She replied, “A person with sight but no vision.”

Hope is ridiculously optimistic.  It has vision, insight into what should be and what will be one day.  It refuses to be intimidated by a relationship that looks like Humpty-Dumpty who sat on a wall, fell off, and lay shattered in little pieces on the ground.  It sees things no one else seems to see.  It sees a miracle.  It sees Humpty-Dumpty mended and sitting on the wall again!

Helen Keller’s teacher was ridiculously hopeful when, humanly speaking, there was so little hope at all in the situation.  She believed Helen could become a productive human being.  She believed it, she got Helen to believe it because she knew God believed it, and she set out to do her part to make it happen.

We need a lot more teachers like that in the church of Jesus Christ.  There are many blind and deaf people who need someone to believe them into usefulness.  Many Christians just need someone to say to them, “You can do it!  Even if you tried and failed, you can try again.  I’m behind you.”

Maybe some of you are wrestling with children who, unlike Helen Keller, have all their faculties, have everything going for them, and yet are a real disappointment to you.  Will they ever become what you long for them to be in the Lord?  Can you lovingly trust them to become the people they were created to be before Satan got his sticky little fingers on them?

This has nothing to do with our personality either.  Some of us are more naturally inclined to be hopeful and trusting of other people.  Others are more cynical.  God’s Spirit transcends all our foibles and personality traits.  The most negative thinker among us can become optimistic in the Lord.  This is what faith, hope, and love do.  In the end it depends not on my performance but on God’s promises.

Perhaps you are beating yourself up because you feel your kid would have been a better Christian if you had been a better mother.  That is not necessarily so.

I was teaching Proverbs 31 to a class of young mothers.  I began by explaining that this “bionic Christian lady” who lurks rather accusingly in these pages didn’t really exist except in the imagination of the writer, perhaps King Lemuel, writer of the first nine verses of chapter 31.  It was, he says, something “that his mother taught him” (Proverbs 31:1).

I asked the young moms how many of them thought this concept was hard to grasp.  Most of them were in the tough child-rearing years, when the idea that their children would ever sit down and lovingly write a poem about their wonderful advice blew their minds!  It was too much to hope for, even for the most optimistic of parents.  Yet parents need to look past their children’s present behavior and with biblical hope, trust their kids to come through.  Not because they are bionic Christian parents, but because we have a bionic God!

It’s all right to dream, and we should.  Dream that our kids grow up to love Jesus to distraction and give themselves sacrificially for a lost and broken world.  But we can do more than dream. We can instruct them in the ways of God and make sure they are well versed in Scripture.  We can determine to give them as many chances to try and fail as it takes.  We can certainly explain that we are only models of growth and learning, not models of perfection. We can point them to God, the perfect parent, who trusts them to be all He wants them to be down here.

Agape love moves us to hope for and believe the best about our kids when they are at their worst. God wants us to reckon on the fact that the incorrigible little liar is of great worth and that through prayer and trust “this too shall pass.”  Love is the will to believe more than the evidence demands.

Who are you worried about?  A husband you are trying to forgive and trust again?  A friend who has hurt you?  A child who looks as though she will never follow the Lord as you long for her to do?  A loved one who is an unbeliever and laughs at your faith?  A family of siblings who seem to hate each other?  A spouse who has told you the love has run out in your marriage and he wants out?  Love them with agape love.  And, of course, for this you need Jesus, but for this you have Jesus!

Hope is overwhelming confidence in the God who can do anything with anyone at any time in any place.

In His Love,

Jill Briscoe

Executive Editor

Just Between Us Magazine