BEING CONTENT

Molly Coltart

“Not that I speak of any personal need, for I have learned to be content (and self-sufficient through Christ, satisfied to the point where I am not disturbed or uneasy) regardless of my circumstances.I know how to get along and live humbly (in difficult times), and I also know how to enjoy abundance and live in prosperity. In any and every circumstance I have learned the secret (of facing life), whether well fed or hungry, whether having an abundance or being in need. I can do all things He has called me to do through Him who strengthens and empowers me (to fulfill His purpose — I am self sufficient in Christ’s sufficiency; I am ready for anything and equal to anything through Him who infuses me with inner strength and confident peace).” Philippians 4:11–13

I look at these words and I am so challenged with this very thing in this season of my life. When I hear the word ‘contentment,’ I have a vision of sitting on the deck of a beautiful house overlooking the sea with a cup of tea in my hands and the sun on my face. Not a worry in the world and everything is going well, with a sense of bliss overwhelming my soul. There’s money in my bank, my body and mind are healthy, I’m surrounded by loving family and friends, and my daughter is as happy as can be, this is what my mind tells me is contentment.

However I am learning more and more that life for very few of us ever looks like that. Often on social media/media I see adverts promising that kind of life if you will just buy this book or take this supplement, or follow this program. The world tries to sell us contentment. Yet the most content people I have ever met are not the wealthy, the fittest/healthiest or the most successful. It’s the people that don’t have much, yet have this aura about them that is full of peace and an inner joy, some of them despite awful circumstances. This is who I aspire to be like.

Paul obviously had found this place of peace and contentment despite what we read as the most harrowing of situations, I’m on a journey to find out how.

At the moment it seems as if everything I believed I am, and everything that I thought I needed has been stripped from me. There have been moments when I have hit rock bottom, like a tree that has been cut back to merely the stump. I can’t see ahead, all I can see is what is in front of me and take one day at a time.

I’m in a process of realizing my nothingness without God. Being stripped back to begin to understand probably for the first time in my life who I really am without any add ons or crutches or people to hide behind or affirm my identity. I no longer have a deep need to be seen as successful, or admired, in fact at times it seems I am avoided, or that my situation is too sad for anyone to want to enter in with me for fear of it being ‘too much.” I have to let go of the judgements of others as to what I should and shouldn’t do, too little faith or inability to integrate as expected. I have no job, my health is not good, I have no family around me, I have no idea what the future holds, and so I am forced to just take one day at a time and find goodness and thankfulness in the everyday moment by moment.

This is very hard sometimes because our flesh can be very dominant and convincing of what it needs. Often the flesh is the thing that screams the loudest. I have been battling with severe fatigue and back to back headaches and migraines for five months, before that I had been struggling with stomach issues and severe anxiety. My body is tired and my mind and emotions absolutely exhausted and crying out for relief, and this is the thing that shouts the loudest. My mind tells me that if this would just go, everything would be better.

So I come before God completely empty handed, and all I can do some days is ask for mercy. I am growing to trust God when everything in my life makes no sense whatsoever. I am completely reliant on His daily grace each day that I wake up, to be able to take care of my daughter and trust that He will provide on a daily basis.

When my husband was ill with Leukemia, God prompted me to do a study on hope. I spent a day going through all the scriptures I could find in the concordance, and I wrote them out in my diary. Funnily enough a very random scripture jumped out at me which I had never seen before, it was from Zechariah 9:12;

“Return to the stronghold (of security and prosperity), O prisoners of hope; Even today I am declaring that I will restore double (your former prosperity) to you.”

The reason this meant something to me was that I felt that I was in a situation that I hadn’t chosen for myself, and had no power over to change. I felt completely powerless and trapped, the only thing I had to hold onto was hope, and trust that God had us firmly in His hands. So essentially I was a prisoner of hope. The scripture before talks about a waterless pit. In those days they would throw prisoners down an empty well and put a stone on top. The prisoner had no way of escape, they were trapped in darkness and isolation with no way out. Often our lives can feel like that, a deep pit filled with darkness, and all we have to turn to is hope. Hope in a God who sees, and is sovereign, even in the most hopeless situations.

I am learning that my trust in God cannot be in my circumstances, (that makes it circumstantial faith, which is opposite to faith in God’s sovereignty, His character and his goodness). My faith has to be in God. This requires incredible trust in a God we cannot see, and often cannot feel. The only way it is possible is in the place of intimacy with Him, where you know Him so well that you don’t question His power in any given situation. He is okay with us questioning the circumstances and pouring out our pain and frustration just as David did regularly, but it always has to come back to a deep trust that God is for me, and even though my circumstances may not be proof of that, I have to trust that He is working behind the scenes to make it good, and that He sees the bigger picture.

Have I mastered this?….NO! It’s a daily battle and struggle for me. I hate the word, but it’s a ‘process.’

“Trust at the mercy of the response it receives is bogus trust. All is uncertainty and anxiety. In trembling insecurity the disciples pleads for further proofs — each one less convincing than the one that went before. In the end the need to trust dies of pure frustration. What the disciple has not learned, is that tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or guarantee any certainty of its presence. Jesus calls us to hand over our autonomous self in unshaken confidence. When the craving for reassurances is stifled, trust happens…..’blessed are those who have not seen yet believe.’ John 20:29”

The Ragamuffin Gospel — Brennan Manning.

I am realising that to be truly alive in Christ on this earth is to be broken, because to be broken requires us to stand in need of grace. It helps us to face who we really are, and brings about a revelation of our absolute fundamental need for God. That all efforts apart from this has no substance. Walking in our own efforts and flesh and desires is a fake version of life, it’s a mirage. It doesn’t lead to peace and it certainly doesn’t lead to joy and contentment. It is only through brokenness and a revelation of grace that any of us could dare to be like Christ.

There is a lady that I sometimes meet with. She was bound to a wheelchair for eight years, after two years of anger and frustration she went to the bottom of her garden away from her children to shout at God. Somehow she fell out of her wheelchair and landed helplessly in a big pile of cow dung. As she lay there in even more rage than before, she felt God break through her anger and ask her to let Him in, into that place of frustration and anger and resentment. In that big pile of cow dung she felt a peace and contentment that she had never felt before, as she just gave in and let go. God didn’t heal her for another six years, but she says she was more at peace in those six years than she had ever been. From that wheelchair she wrote some amazing books which have helped thousands of people. She is one of my inspirations.

I believe the world needs disciples who are not afraid to be exactly who they are, even in their brokenness. The Mary Magdalene’s of this world who lay aside all self dignity and pour themselves out in sheer love for Christ not desiring the affirmation of others, or being affected by judgement. She had accepted the truth of her absolute nothingness without Jesus. She had nothing to lose. These disciples love much because they have been forgiven, broken and in need of a Saviour.

This is my aim, whether I will reach it in my lifetime I have no idea. In the middle of my exhaustion and pain, I long to be a child who knows her Father is with her, even when it doesn’t make sense. To be content, even if the circumstances don’t change. I want change more than anything else, but perhaps the change needs to start in my heart, to let go and just trust and to feel safe in my Father’s arms even when a storm is raging inside and around me. When that change comes, perhaps I can say like Paul I have learned to be content in every circumstance.