Greetings
I trust that everyone who had the opportunity of taking some much needed (and greatly deserved) rest during the Term 2 break did indeed get this rest and are fully recharged and ready for Term 3!
Last term I shared a devotion with the CST central office team about finding contentment and joy in TODAY. In Philippians 4, Paul writes about contentment, telling the church in Philippi that he has “learned to be content regardless of his circumstances.”
I’ve been a Christian now for over 20 years and if I’m honest, contentment is something I’m still working on! (Maybe I’m a slow learner? 😊)
Paul teaches us that contentment isn’t something that just happens by accident nor is it something God gives us as a gift. Contentment is something we need to learn. We learn it through times of lack and times of plenty; through the good times and the bad; so that we, like Paul, can say that we are content no matter what’s going on in our lives. And that means learning to be content with where we are and who we are today, even if where we are today isn’t where we might want to be.
“It is easy to wish our lives away and to be focusing on tomorrow, especially when we have our eyes set on something we’re hoping for or wanting in the future”
One of my favourite movies is a movie called Click, starring Adam Sandler. In the movie, Sandler plays Michael Newman, an overworked architect who neglects his family. When he acquires a magical universal remote from Morty, an eccentric stranger, that enables him to "fast forward" through unpleasant or outright dull parts of his life, he soon learns that those seemingly bad moments that he skips over contained valuable time with his family and important life lessons. This movie is all about the importance of being content in the “now’”. Whenever I watch it, it’s always a bit of a wake-up call to me about how important it is for me to be content and to find joy in today (in the “now”) and to not want to “fast forward” my life through the “boring” stuff or to some point in the future that I might be hoping to get to or to something that I’m wanting to achieve. I’m sure if we’re honest, we’ve all had times in our lives where we’ve wished we did have a magic remote control to fast forward our lives! (Or perhaps a remote control to rewind our lives to redo something we got wrong!)
The truth is that it is easy to wish our lives away and to be focussing on tomorrow, especially when we have our eyes set on something we’re hoping for or wanting in the future. It might be like in the movie Click that we’re focusing on our career and the next promotion. Or if we’re a parent, maybe we’re wishing we had a remote control to fast forward through our child’s life past the new born stage – past the stage of sleep deprivation as a result of having to wake up through the night to feed them; past the stage of nappy changes; past the stage of teething; past the stage where we are unable to reason with them…the list goes on! We can be so focussed on getting to that next “stage” or that next “point” in life, that one day we wake up and realise our child is all grown up and we’d do anything to go back in time to when they were little again.
“The problem with focusing too much on the future and not being content and finding joy in today, is that we miss out on the present.”
You see the problem with focussing too much on the future and not being content and finding joy in today, is that we miss out on the present. We can miss out on enjoying all the things that are going on in our lives right now, things that God wants us to enjoy. Things that will be gone all too soon, in the blink of an eye. I love that old saying, “Yesterday’s history; tomorrow’s a mystery; but today’s a gift – that’s why they call it the present”!
So how does this apply to the COVID-19 situation? I’m sure most of us would be more than happy to get our hands on a magic remote control to fast forward to 2021 or at least to a year when things are back to normal! But what would we miss out on if we could actually do that? One thing we’d miss out on is the precious and valuable time we get to spend right now with our loved ones, loved ones who may not be with us in the future. Maybe we’d miss out on important life lessons that God is wanting to teach us?
For some, disappointment may have come this year by not being able to go on that overseas holiday you were planning and I’m certain many of you (myself included) are disappointed that we can’t visit family on the mainland right now. But I’d encourage all of us to look at what we are able to do (and to celebrate and to find joy and contentment in these things) during this season, even if it’s only the little things, the simple things. Maybe God is telling us, like Paul did, to learn to be content in this season and to not want to “fast forward” it. Because it is a season, and like all seasons, it too shall pass..
David Gillman — CEO Christian Schools Tasmania