Hi Reader, Welcome to Living Contentment - your weekly nudge towards a life of Biblical contentment. Here are today's three contentment-related things for you to read | do | pray READ THIS Sometimes the thing that can wrestle away our contentment is our worry. It's the disappointment, dissolution, our heartache. The pain of betrayal, the hurt of someone else's anger, or just being present in another's suffering snatches away our contentment. But it doesn't have to. It's easy to believe we can be content OR dissapointed. But it doesn't have to be either/or. Douglas McKelvey (author of the incredibly life-giving book series Every Moment Holy) said something along the lines of: You can't hold on to hope - without also living in the pain that exists because of the gap between where you are - and what that hope longs for. If you dream of a better relationship with your child, you have to sit in the pain that it's not great right now. Yet. Waiting for the fulfillment of things you hope for means you are by definition waiting - so you still have the struggle of the wait. Don't trick yourself into thinking because you have pain you can't also have hope. DO THIS What is that one great thing you're waiting for? That relationship to be restored, that hope to be fulfilled, that dream to be realized? Can you live with both hope and pain? Not feeling like you have to choose - or even switch back and forth - but live in the complexity of that paradoxical reality? PRAY THIS God of all our dreams, Talk to you next Thursday! ~George
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