Tag: contentment

The Better Choice

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

The Better Choice

Rachel had the whole weekend mapped out before her old college friends even packed their bags. Linens washed, flowers cut, a dinner planned down to the last dish. She wanted it perfect, the way she wanted most things.

Her sister Amanda showed up to help and got handed a list before she’d shed her coat.

Then the women arrived, tired from the road and loud with laughter, and something in the living room shifted. Nicole told stories nobody remembered right. Jennifer pulled up old photographs. Melissa talked about aging parents and marriages that had worn thin in places and dreams that hadn’t died, just gone quiet. Marie shared how her husband had left her for a younger woman.

Amanda set her phone face down on the table and stayed.

Rachel ran the kitchen alone. Sauce boiling over, a missing ingredient, her phone buzzing like a hive. She could hear the laughter over the kitchen island. She could see her sister sitting easy among the guests, and something hard and tired rose up in her.

She came out in her apron, spoon in hand, and said what tired people say.

The room went quiet. Nicole touched Amanda’s arm and told Rachel gently that nobody came for a perfect table. Jennifer offered to order pizza. Melissa already had the schedule on her phone. Marie smiled.

Rachel looked at the room. The meal unfinished, the list still long, and four women she’d loved for twenty years sitting right there, telling the truth to each other.

She took off the apron. Silenced the phone. Sat down beside her sister.

Dinner came late and simple. Nobody minded.

Scripture

“But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:42, KJV from the story of Mary and Martha found in the Bible, the gospel of Luke (Luke 10:38–42), where Jesus visits the home of two sisters in a village.

Reflection

Rachel wasn’t doing anything wrong. Martha wasn’t either. Jesus never scolded her for the work. He named what the work had cost her: she’d grown worried, distracted, resentful. The serving had eaten the peace right out of her.

That’s the trouble with good things. They don’t announce themselves as thieves. They just quietly take the seat meant for something better.

Mary chose to sit down and listen. That choice still costs something now. A phone left face down. A few dishes left in the sink. The nerve to believe the world won’t end if the list stays unfinished a while longer.

There’s always another task waiting like a dog at the door. But some moments only pass through once. A friend across the table. An evening with family. A quiet minute with God. The better choice isn’t doing more. It’s stopping long enough to notice who’s already in the room.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,
My days fill up fast with tasks and noise, and even my good work can turn to worry in my hands. Teach me to set it down when it’s time. Let me be as present with You and with those I love as I am busy for them. Give me the sense to choose peace over perfection, and never let my serving crowd out the sitting still. 

In Jesus’ name, 
Amen.

When Money Promises More Than It Can Give

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

The Life Jessica Thought She Wanted

I have known Jessica since she was a girl of four, barefoot in her mama’s yard, telling anybody who’d listen about the house she was going to have one day. Biggest one on the block, she said. A pool shaped like the state of Texas and a car with a name too fancy for a child to pronounce right. Most kids dream in crayon. Jessica dreamed in blueprints.

She grew up and went and got it too. The right school, the right sorority, a young lawyer for a husband who’d passed the bar the same summer she did her hair different for the wedding photos. But when he took a job defending folks who couldn’t pay him, she looked at him different. Called it a lack of ambition. Filed the papers before the ink dried on their first anniversary card.

Two years later she married a cardiologist, a good man raising two kids from a marriage that hadn’t worked out either. “He can provide,” she told her sister, like she was reading off a spec sheet. “I like him fine. Reckon I’ll grow to love him over time.”

For a stretch of years it looked like she’d won. The mansion sat up on the hill like a promise kept. The car in the driveway caught the morning sun just right. She had a membership card that opened doors most people never even see.

Then somewhere past forty, the process server showed up at that big front door with papers in his hand. Her husband had found somebody younger, thirty years old, and decided the vows were negotiable after all.

The mansion went the way mansions go when the marriage does. Jessica found herself in a little apartment, dusting off a resume ten years old, doing arithmetic on the kitchen table late at night. Car lease. Rent. Club dues she was too proud to cancel. A trip to the resort at St. John in the US Virgin Islands already paid for that she couldn’t back out of without everybody asking why.

Everything she’d built her peace on turned out to be sand the whole time. She just hadn’t waded out far enough yet to feel it move.

Scripture for Today

“Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” – Hebrews 13:5 (KJV)

The Trap of Trusting in Wealth

Now I want to be careful here, because money itself never asked to be the villain. It puts groceries on the table and a roof over a family and it can do a world of good in a hurting world if you let it. The trouble starts when money quits being a tool and starts being an identity. When it’s not just what’s in your pocket anymore but what you think you’re worth.

That kind of hunger never eats a full meal. There’s always a bigger house down the road, a S-class to replace your E-class Mercedes in somebody else’s driveway, a neighborhood with a nicer yard art. You can chase that horizon your whole life and die still running toward it.

And here’s the cruel joke of it. The very things we buy for comfort end up costing us our rest. We lie awake guarding what we own instead of enjoying what we’ve been given. What was supposed to set us free starts locking the doors from the inside.

Money can buy a lot of comfort. It has never once bought permanence. It cannot promise a marriage will hold, or a heart will heal, or a person will stay through the hard seasons. Only one voice in this world has ever made that promise and kept it.

The Wealth That Cannot Be Taken Away

Hebrews doesn’t just tell us to quit coveting like that’s some kind of discipline we can white-knuckle our way through. It hands us the reason underneath it. God said, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” That’s not a suggestion for better living. That’s bedrock.

Being content doesn’t mean you stop working or stop dreaming or stop trying to do better for your family. It means your joy quits living and dying by what’s sitting in your driveway or your bank account.

A small apartment with peace in it beats a mansion with dread creeping through every hallway. A modest car driven without fear of losing it beats a luxury one that’s really just a nice cage.

Real wealth is knowing Somebody stays when everything else packs up and leaves. Jobs end. People we love disappoint us, sometimes on purpose. Money comes in like the tide and goes right back out again just as fast. Possessions wear thin, the money for international dream vacations runs out, and the invitations stop coming eventually, every single time.

But God stays. That part never changes.

Peace shows up the day we stop asking dollars to do a job only the Lord was ever built to do. When we trust Him instead, we find out what freedom actually tastes like. Contentment that isn’t for sale, and can’t be repossessed either.

Three Takeaways

  1. Ask yourself honestly what your peace is really standing on. Is it God, or is it your paycheck, your title, your address?
  2. Practice thanks today, right where you are. Don’t wait for the next thing to arrive before you’re grateful for what’s already in your hands.
  3. Remember what can’t be taken. Houses burn, cars wreck, and marriages sometimes end even when we did our best. God’s presence and His promises are the one inheritance nobody can repossess.

Prayer

Father,
Forgive me for the times I put my trust in money and things instead of You. Teach me gratitude for what I already hold in my hands. Remind me, on the hard nights especially, that You promised never to leave me nor forsake me, and that Your word has never once come back void.
Amen.

 

Finding Peace in the Right Now

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

The Woman Who Was Waiting for Tomorrow

There is a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. Addy knew it well. She sat at her desk one afternoon with a spreadsheet glowing in front of her, numbers lined up neat as tombstones, and she could not have told you a single figure on it. Her mind had wandered off somewhere down the road, chasing a life that had not happened yet.

She ran the list the way folks do when they are dissatisfied and do not quite know why. The job paid too little and asked too much. The apartment had grown smaller every year without changing size. The savings account looked thin under the light. Friends who used to know her secrets now only knew her weather, fine, busy, hanging in there. And the man she loved, the one whose coffee she still made every morning, had gone quiet on the subject of forever.

She had a sentence she repeated to herself so often it had worn smooth, like a stone carried in a pocket. If I could just get the promotion. If we could just move somewhere better. If he would just ask me to marry him. When I finish my MBA. Then I could be happy.

Happiness kept its address just around the next corner. It always does, for people like Addy. For people like most of us.

The Cross-Stitch on Grandma’s Wall

One evening she drove out to see her grandmother, the way she did every few weeks out of duty more than desire, if she was honest. The house smelled the way it always had, coffee and cedar and something like the past. On the wall hung an old cross-stitch, the fabric gone the color of weak tea, the thread soft with fifty years of dust. The words had not faded, though. Words like that rarely do.

Her grandmother had lived in that same small house through every kind of weather life can throw at a person. She had buried a husband. She had counted out grocery money at the end of hard months. She had outlived most of the friends who once sat at her table. And yet there was something steady in her, something Addy had been hunting for in all the wrong corners of the future. A quiet joy that did not depend on the circumstances lining up right.

Her grandmother’s life had never been perfect. Her peace had never asked it to be.

Addy sat with that a long while, longer than she meant to. She began to see that she had spent years chasing a mirage, waiting for her circumstances to get good enough before she would allow herself to feel grateful. While she kept her eyes fixed on some better tomorrow, she had been walking right past the mercies God had already laid at her feet today.

Contentment, she came to understand, was not a place you finally arrive at once every piece falls into line. It was a choice you make in the room you are standing in right now.

God may still change things. He may open doors nobody expected, mend what has been broken, or carry a person into a whole new season. But we are not required to put our peace in storage until He does. We can trust Him with the waiting and still live wide awake in the present.

What Scripture Says

Paul wrote from a prison cell, of all places, when he said:

“Not that I speak in respect of want:

for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Philippians 4:11, KJV

A man in chains, teaching the rest of us about freedom.

Three Things Worth Carrying With You

Contentment is learned, not handed to you. Paul did not say he was born easy in his own skin. He said he learned it. Contentment is not a lucky temperament some people are dealt at birth like a good hand of cards. It is a discipline, built one day at a time by trusting God through whatever season you happen to be standing in. You practice it the way you practice anything, by noticing His goodness on purpose, by saying thank you before you feel like it, and by refusing to let what is missing drown out what has already been given.

Your circumstances do not get to run the show. Real contentment is not pretending the hard things do not hurt. It is refusing to hand those hard things the keys to your peace. Whether the season is full or lean, whether you are surrounded or you are lonesome, the deepest kind of joy does not come from how things are going. It comes from knowing whose you are.

The word “next” will wear you out if you let it. The next promotion. The next relationship. The next move, the next milestone, the next answered prayer, and then, finally, you tell yourself, you will be happy. But there is always another next waiting behind the one you just reached. That road does not end. Peace begins the day you quit postponing your life and plant your feet in the ground you are standing on right now.

You may not have everything you are asking God for. But He has not left the room. His grace has not run dry. His goodness has not clocked out for the day.

Do not miss today while you are busy waiting on tomorrow.

A Prayer for Contentment

Dear Lord,

I confess I have been restless more often than I would like to admit, dissatisfied with the very ground You have set me on. I have let worries about my work, my money, my relationships, and my future steal a peace that was never theirs to take.

Forgive me for keeping such a careful count of what I lack, and such a poor one of what You have already given.

Teach me the secret Paul knew from that cell. Help me trust Your timing instead of my own impatience. Help me see Your goodness even in the plain, unremarkable middle of an ordinary day. Let my satisfaction rest in You, not in whatever changes I am still hoping for. Give me the sense to keep working toward what is good without making my joy wait on the outcome.

Help me live grateful and faithful in the life You have actually given me. Not the one I keep imagining. This one, right here, right now.

In Jesus’ name,
Amen.

#ContentmentInChrist #PeaceInThePresent #TrustGodsTiming

Written by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You are welcome to share or adapt it provided proper credit is given to the author.