The Secret to Contentment

The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, written by Jeremiah Burroughs in the early 1600’s. In it, Burroughs presses us to consider the root of our discontentment as well as the source of true contentment. He makes an interesting assertion that we 
 “come to contentment, not so much by way of addition, as by way of subtraction.” He says that there is no end to what the world can offer us by way of things to buy or possess; so we’ll never be satisfied by adding possessions, because there will always be so much we don’t have. Instead, we subtract - we subtract our desires back into line with our reality, or as Burroughs puts it, “[the content man subtracts] from his desires, so as to make his desires and his circumstances even and equal.”

Besides subtraction, he goes on to describe the other side of contentment, the addition part, which C.S. Lewis later delved into head-first in The Weight of Glory, where he wrote:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

From Live It: Wes Shelnutt is the product manager of Money4Life Coaching