Rotten Bones Not On The Menu

Thanks to Tess for Red Trucks and Rotten Bones.  How very true!  Jealousy and discontent can kill your joy in a flash.  Yet gratitude and contentment can restore it.


A year or so ago, our son wrote about how God worked in his heart on just such a theme. (The background is that, at the time of writing, he had recently gotten over his allergy to eggs, but he is still, to this day, allergic to milk, peanuts, and tree nuts.  We generally take food along for him wherever we go, so that he has something safe to eat.)  Allow me to crack open a window into his thoughts… 


After a family outing with our cousins to the Creation Museum, we stopped on the way home at Cracker Barrel.  At the table, I was feeling like I had the raw end of the deal, because everyone else had what I thought was really good food–pancakes, fish, salads, biscuits, and french toast, while I, as usual, had my own food, this time just a home-made turkey sandwich with real mayo (the kind with eggs).  All of a sudden it hit me that the Lord had graciously allowed me to eat eggs now, and what was I dwelling on?  The things I couldn’t eat!  I remembered my sister, Megan, telling me once that you can’t be truly happy unless you’re content.  So I thanked the Lord that I could eat eggs, and decided to be content.  After that, I could enjoy our time together at Cracker Barrel–and my food.


Contentment is truly a moment by moment choice we can learn to make.  It will involve establishing priorities for what we will value.  (Tess offered two very helpful questions for addressing the heart of this issue.)  In Christ, we are given so much, and it’s of eternal value, besides.  When we and our children learn, as Paul taught Timothy, to “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness”, we can understand how Paul could counsel Timothy that, “godliness actually is a means of great gain, when accompanied by contentment.”
(I Timothy 6:11 & 6:6)


When we know what to value, turning our focus, then, from what we don’t have to what we do have really does make all the difference.  The Apostle Paul’s encouragement to rejoice, when he himself was imprisoned for his commitment to Christ, has always been a challenge to me.  He said he’d learned to be content in whatever circumstances he was in, and I believe he reveals some of that secret in the same chapter (Philippians 4).  Rejoice in the Lord, he says, pray about everything with thanksgiving, and think about the true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, excellent, and worthy of praise.  If that’s not a recipe for contentment, I don’t know what is.