Calling and Contentment

Monday 1/2/2012 5:37 AM

Yesterday I called my mom to wish her a Happy New Year.  She was experiencing some anxiety because one of her stepdaughters was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer and needs to have surgery this week.  For Mom, the anxiety evidenced itself as a flare up of her colitis.  She has spent much of her life worrying but it seems to me that it has intensified as she has aged.

Today I read Psalm 131 as part of my devotional reading and it seems like good advice for my mom.  “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.  But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.”  When I talk with Mom I usually suggest that she should trust God to deal with matters over which she has no control and simply live contently, knowing God will walk with her through whatever circumstances come her way.  As I contemplated the verses I began to consider my own contentment in life.

My first thought was that of the contentment I feel having all of my children and grandchildren around for the holidays, enjoying each other’s company.  I thought about how easy it is to be content when things are going smoothly and everyone is healthy and gainfully employed.  But as I reflected further I remembered my struggle last year when I longed to be a person of notoriety or someone who did something noteworthy.  I didn’t want to live my life in obscurity; I wanted to be someone who made a difference.  I was not content to be the person God made me to be in the place in which he had placed me.

An excerpt from Carlo Carretto’s book, Letters from the Desert, addresses this issue.  He writes,

Whether you are on the sand worshiping, or at the teacher’s desk in a classroom, what does it matter as long as you are doing the will of God?  And if the will of God urges you to seek out the poor, to give up all you possess, or to leave for distant lands, what does the rest matter.  Or if it calls you to found a family, or take on a job in a city, why should you have any doubts?

Somehow it seems like giving up all I possess, going to distant lands, seeking out the poor and living and worshiping in the desert is more “spiritual” and of more use to God than founding a family while taking a job working at a teacher’s desk in the city.  The latter calling is the one to which God has called me.  I pray that I can be both effective in carrying out his calling and content while doing so.