Live With Physical Contentment & Spiritual Desire, Not Vice Versa

Word of the Day: ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.’ (Proverbs 13:12)

As I grow older, although I live with no regrets, I occasionally think ‘what if’.  Mostly it’s ‘what if I knew back in the 1980s to invest in tech stocks’, or ‘what if I had taken that job opportunity in the 2000’s’.  But I realize quickly that all these thoughts are moot; the decisions and actions made in the past were done with the information on hand at the time.  I am where I am because this is where God wanted me to be today, and there is no physically better place for me to be – except to be in the arms of Jesus! I am content.

Those who are seasoned citizens like myself grew up in a time where we understood that many things came if we would be patient.  Today, the young folks expect instant gratification and are discouraged and disappointed when they cannot afford what their parents or grandparents currently enjoy.  Having grown up with parents who lived as children through the Great Depression and then World War II, my parents taught me through example to be frugal and they excelled when retirement came and their funds were limited.  They, like all of us, desired nice things and amenities, but those were special exceptions and not expected needs.

The costs of homes and automobiles are currently very expensive, and unless there is discipline in saving money a home or car can either be out of reach or getting one or the other (or both at the same time) can cause financial calamity.  When I was a supervisor, I had a couple of younger employees, at separate times, come to me asking for raises.  They were compensated already within the salary range of their colleagues, but they both had purchased European luxury cars and lived in the more expensive apartment complexes in Tampa.    They both were good employees but not the best employees, and they wanted raises that would exceed what the top performers were making.

I asked them why they believed they needed to be paid as top performers, and both gave similar answers; they were struggling to afford their basic needs (food, paying for utilities and rent) on their salaries.  I pointed out that their salaries were on par with their performance and skills, and they their colleagues, most older men and women, seemed to be doing well and living within their means.  I asked them to consider if they were perhaps attempting to live a lifestyle they could not afford (being a supervisor, one had to tread carefully on such personal issues).   Neither got a raise other than the annual merit increase they earned.

One ended up taking another job with a different company; another stayed for several more years before changing careers.  The others for the most part stayed until our contract ended almost ten years later, a couple of years after I was promoted to a corporate-level position.  Both in the limited contact I had with them after they left, continued to struggle while the others were content and maintaining.  The difference was though everyone wanted ‘more and better’ in their lives, those who were content knew that the temporary inconvenience of today, or ‘hope deferred’, led to ‘longing fulfilled’ when they had saved sufficiently to buy a home or a car of their desired choice.

Society today is often led by ‘instant gratification’, marriages end in acrimony as spouses deem each other incompatible and one or both want something (or someone) more desirable.  The purchase of something desired but unaffordable ends in repossessions, bad credit, and a financial pit hard to climb out of.  But if one has the Lord in their life, His discipline to persevere and His guidance to be patient is often rewarded by a life of Hope fulfilled with contentment.  We know that not everyone has a perfect life where this occurs; illness and tragedies happen that can derail our perception of what we hoped to have, but the Lord’s Hope in Eternal Life can never be derailed.

Have Faith and Hope in the Lord, in Spiritual desire for Christ. It is blessing when our physical desires are fulfilled, but those blessings are often found in contentment with what we have, understanding what is within our means and not what is necessarily desired.  The true aim of our desires should be is our longing for Jesus, fulfilled by an Eternal Life with Him, and not in the physical desires of this world, which will all pass away.