Content in any and every situation…

For over 8 years our car fuel gauge hasn’t worked. We worked out early on that if we tracked our mileage and fuelled up every 500 kilometres, we’d never run out of fuel. Somehow, we’ve gotten used to not needing a fuel gauge in our car.

Life’s hardest problems are not quite as simple as that, of course.

But I do wonder if doing without, and learning to survive and getting to a place of not missing whatever it is we might miss, is the sacred prize.

I imagine Paul writing Philippians later in life, reflecting over the years, considering his words of self-recrimination of Romans 7:15, among other things, and as he muses, he catches a glint of grace. He sees the work of Christ in him that has formed the ability to do without — to live without coveting.

It’s the great invitation of spirituality — to negate, to deny, to repeal, to reject things of the material. But it’s not just that. Like our fuel gauge, we learn to subsist without adding something, for that’s the prevailing wisdom — that’s the error — that there must be something material that replaces the material that we banish.

With every material thing we desist in doing, we add the spiritual thing, which is the rejection of everything that can be coveted.

The winningest way is to live empty handed and learn contentment in that barren place. Doesn’t sound attractive to our covetous 21st Century lives does it? But have you tried it?

For everything we do not need something spiritual is added. As we live stripped bare of needing the thing we’ve grown dependent on, God adds something tangibly spiritual to our lives.

What is added — that spiritual thing we’re destined to at last experience — is the ability to grieve, at least initially, then it is to learn to smile when there is nothing to smile about.

This is that spiritual thing added. Something that nobody can explain, only experience.

This thing that is spiritual, wholly and other-than, is a prize that can only be practiced. It cannot be owned, nor acquired, nor possessed. Yet, this spiritual thing is a possession as long as we let it go and let it come and resolve never to possess it.

Like the paradox of happiness that comes when we stop chasing it.

Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash