C is for Contentment

Well, here we are on week three and I scheduled Contentment for C.  I thought this would be a simple post to write.  As I've thought more about contentment and what it means and how I've felt, I realized this would be a somewhat difficult, maybe even painful, post to write.

What does it mean to be content?  It means being satisfied with what you have, not wanting anything more.  We Choose Virtues calls it having your "wanter" under control.  What is it not?  It is not being greedy, begging, restless.

Xav's love language is gifts.  He loves presents, getting them certainly, but also giving them.  He really enjoys getting "stuff."  But if you indulge that desire in him, is he content with what he has?  Unfortunately, no.  He would like more stuff, please.  He will buy his own stuff, OK?

Mal is a little different.  I am not sure what his love language is.  Or, as I call it, his currency.  He doesn't want tons of things, but if there is one thing he does want, he obsesses over it until he gets it or he finds something else to latch onto.  He is like a bulldog.  Currently, he is saving money for a Lego train he just has to have.  Forget that he has three Lego trains.  Forget that he has dozens of trains.  He wants this one train and is willing to save for it.

Do you know what I wanted to be when I grew up?  I wanted to be a wife and mother.  That's it.  I'll take a husband and one dozen children, please.  I worked diligently through high school with that goal in mind.  I took secretarial classes; typing, shorthand, business math (If you took the Way Back Machine to the early 80s, you'd see that we only had to take one high school math class.  You wouldn't catch me dead in a "fake math" class like algebra or statistics.  What on earth would a young lady need that for anyway?) solely because you had to have a focus of some sort in your classes.  And I could always fall back on that stuff, if I didn't get married for a year or two after school.  But I took lots of classes to prepare myself to be a mommy; childcare, cooking, sewing.  I was going to be the best dang mommy EVER!

My plans never quite worked out for the longest time.

The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry.

~Robert Burns

Hop back in the Way Back Machine and come back to the present.  I have a terrific husband (like the best ever in the whole wide world!), and I have four sons whom I love very much.  And I have a lot of anger, a lot of self-pity, a LOT of discontent.  There is a part that is searching for something more.  There is a part that is never quite happy.  My brain knows that only God can fill those needs.  But I still keep wanting, searching, and hoping.  Hey, God!  There's a hole in my heart that can only be filled by you!  (What can I say, I'm a child of the 80s/young woman of the 90s.)

  

How do you reconcile what's in your head and what's in your heart?