Wanting What We’ve Got

It’s not having what you want. It’s wanting what you’ve got.

— SHERYL CROW (Soaking Up the Sun)

We search high and low for contentment and we never truly find it until we search within and find contentment within God who makes his home in us via his Holy Spirit.

When we accept what God has given us, and where we are in life, notwithstanding the difficulties, because we know these are difficult to accept, we can find a relative contentment that ebbs and flows throughout life.

A pure contentment that remains steadily throughout the whole of our lives is perhaps an unrealistic hope. But an ebbing and flowing contentment, provisional on a vibrant spirituality, is not only possible; we should strive for it.

Building upon the possibilities for a spiritual hope of contentment is best kept simple. It begins from wanting what we’ve got, already. But not all of us have everything we want, so it’s so hard to want what we’ve got when we haven’t got what we desire to have.

We need to begin from somewhere. When we can see ourselves as blessed, right where we are, with everything we have and don’t have, we have a good platform for contentment, today.

If we are happy where we are to begin with, we have a better chance of being happy where God is taking us, as life changes. The main thing is we nurture the demeanour of gratitude and an attitude of thankfulness for the little things, and there are so many of them that contentedness for these things really has no limit.

Contentedness must really be our intention if we are to enjoy it, and we enjoy it most when life is simple, needs are identified and met, and we have room to consider life and the spiritual values that hold to reality.

What we really desire in life we inevitably get, so if being contented is the goal we will soon realise that certain things must be surrendered – like striving for things we don’t have or don’t have prospects for having.

Wanting what we already have, including appreciating our experiences of life thus far; these are noble goals, worthy of our investing in.

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Contentment begins in wanting what we already have; to consider how relatively blessed we actually are. Blessing is relative in everyone’s life. Happy to commence as contented from where we are, we enjoy all-the-more those other blessings that are now also coming.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.