The Secret Art Of Contentment
An ancient lesson for the modern hustle culture
I saw this video a year ago and it lives rent free in my mind, literally randomly popping up in my head a few times a month.
It’s a harsh commentary on what many of us feel with our lives, our work, and maybe even at the soul level, our purpose and meaning.
If you know me, you’ll know the questions about purpose and meaning in life have always wracked my brain. Especially during my bout with leukemia back in 2013, these sorts of questions contended for my attention and won.
The primary message from the artists, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, is a commentary about “the intersection between technology and the cost of humanity for the sake of development and advancement.”
At the crux of it all, the question there-in lies,
“how much of our humanity must we lose, in order to better our lives?”
You ask 5 different people and you will get 5 different answers.
What about you though?
When you look at your life, your work, your purpose - do you feel that you are choosing to sacrifice a bit of your humanity to make ends meet?
Maybe it’s not even to make ends meet, but to have just a little more.
Whether that is just a little more money, to gain just a little more autonomy, to get a little more happiness.
Is that you?
You see, my interpretation of this robot arm trapped in the vicious cycle to stay alive - to stay treading just a little longer - is there is no real resolution in sight.
The robot could stop scraping in the oil, but will ultimately lose fuel and cease to move (a stark metaphor for death). Or the robot can continue to scrape perpetually and work until exhaustion (which is no better of a fate than the former).
Is that not how so many of us feel about our lives? About our work? About our purpose? At what point is there genuine freedom to be experienced?
Will more ever turn into enough? How do we even get there?
Enter contentment.
Contentment, fascinatingly enough is not a virtue to acquire nor a skill to grow. And in the Christian-spiritual sense, it is not a fruit of the Spirit either.
Rather, contentment is a state of being; a perpetual state of satisfaction.
And for the follower of Jesus, contentment is what can set us apart from a world fueled by the god of more. John Mark Comer sharply points out in his book, “Live No Lies”, the only other god whom Jesus mentions by name is “Mammon”. And if you didn’t know, “Mammon”, is the god of money or more accurately, the god of more.
“You cannot serve both God and money”, says Jesus in Matthew 6:24 or better translated, “You cannot serve both God and the god of more”.
You gotta pick one or the other. Not both.
When you realize you have God and that God has you, who you are becoming at the deepest level of your being (your soul) changes. How? Because when your soul’s deepest longings and satisfactions - identity, purpose, and meaning - are all found in God, you realize material things shallow in comparison. You realize having more things is nice, but to access short-term happiness - to have that short-term dopamine hit from hitting that “place order” or “buy now” button - can never give you the long-term happiness and joy which comes from experiencing the love of the Father.
Contentment in God brings you into a perpetual state of satisfaction (in Him) because it brings you the fullest confidence of security when it comes to your life’s purpose and meaning, in your soul’s identity, and in the work you do.
You can challenge me on this, but that pay bump, the new shiny car, or that quick Amazon Prime delivery purchase are all great, but these sorts of things won’t ever (and can’t ever) quench the desire for more, because they can never give us the deep sense of security our souls long for.
But when you know God is on your side, leading you into an abundant life according to His ways and not the ways of Mammon, you know at a soul level, wherever you may be in life, has a purpose and reason all for your good and for God’s fame and glory.
So, I pray wherever you may be in life, you learn this secret art of contentment.
Especially if you find yourself in the vicious cycle of working yourself down to your bones just to sustain the life you have or even worse, the life you want to have. May you experience genuine liberation from such a wicked cycle and find that freedom in the grip of God.
I pray the deep ache your soul has for love, identity, purpose, desire, and meaning can all find its home in the comforting arms of the Heavenly Father.