Contentment No Matter Our Circumstance - John 6:1-15

For me, two themes emerge from our readings today: First: Our God is a God of provision. He graciously and abundantly feeds his people. Second: Our response to his provision: If we respond faithfully, then we will be a contented and hopeful people, no matter our circumstances.
                                                                                                 
I heard a metaphor the other day that explained faith in very simple terms, and I think it fits today’s Gospel. It goes like this, “Grace is God saying, ‘Here is all the good stuff I have to give you.’ Faith is saying, ‘Thank you, I’ll take it.” When we respond in faith in such a simple way to the circumstances of our lives, we become contented, hopeful people.

The challenge for us is, many times, we’re like Philip and Andrew in the Gospel, giving voice to the hopelessness of the situation, giving voice to doubt and anxiety (This thing is never going to work out – we’re short on money, time and bread).  But as it is in our everyday lives, Jesus had the solution in hand before they ever even knew there was a problem.
                                                            
In the responsorial psalm, we heard, “The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all of our needs. Our eyes look hopefully to you, and you feed us in due season; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.” We can infer from this psalm that we can find contentment in God’s provision.

What is contentment? Contentment means that our happiness is not dependent upon circumstances. We can say, “God’s grace is enough. He’ll provide for me. He always does.” But many times we get caught up in "when" thinking: "When I get a certain job ... When I can retire ... When I get the bills paid off, When my treatments are over ... then I'll be happy!" Happiness in that case is contingent on some form of circumstance.


God says, "Be content in this moment.” The reality is, many times, once we get the job, or retire or treatments are over, we'll likely want something else. We’ll likely move on to the next thing that will make us anxious."

For me many times it’s time: “Boy, I’ve got a brutal week ahead. But once I get on the other side of Friday, I’ll be sitting pretty.  I’ll be set. My worries will all be behind me. And then I get to Friday, and another set of anxiety-producing circumstances arise, and I’m no more content than I was before.  I’ve failed to see God’s grace in my circumstances.

In First Timothy, we hear, "True godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. After all, we brought nothing with us when we came into the world, and we can't take anything with us when we leave it. So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content."

In his recent book, “The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity”,  Catholic writer, Matthew Kelly talks about circumstantial contentment He posed the question, “How often do we convince ourselves consciously or unconsciously that if we get the car that we’ve had our eye on, that perfect dress, the dream house…we’ll be happy?

He says, two outcomes can come of that: 1) we get the car, for example, and for a few days or weeks, we love it, we’re totally enamored with it.  Getting that car has given us a measure of happiness, but that happiness is circumstantial; it is dependent on that car. If the car were taken away, the happiness would “evaporate”, it would fade.

2) The worse outcome is we don’t get the car, the dress or the house, and we spend the days, months, or years in self-imposed victimhood believing that if we only had gotten the car, the dress or the house, we would have been happy forever. The person who never gets that car, for example never comes to the realization that the car was never going to make him/her happy. So he lives perpetually in the false promise, lives perpetually in the lie.
                                                                                                                                                
It’s kinda like that quote that has been attributed to comedian Jim Carrey. He said, “I wish everyone could get rich and famous and get everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that’s not the answer.”

When we are dependent on circumstances (persons, places or things) instead of God’s grace, we tend to be not very content.  Similarly, when we place our hope in circumstances (persons, places and things) instead of God’s grace, we tend not to be very hopeful.

If, for example, we place our hope in somebody who is unable to deliver on that hope, we're likely to be disappointed - not necessarily because they’re not capable or unwilling to deliver, but because we misplaced our hope. And if we allow that misplacing of hope to develop into a pattern of behavior, we can lose our belief that hope is even possible. Why? Because we’ve conditioned our hope to be contingent on circumstances (people) and not on God’s provision.

If we approach marriage, for example, overly invested in the hope that the other person is going to fulfill all of our needs (if we’re like an empty bucket waiting to be filled), when our spouse falls short of our lofty expectations of them, we’ll inevitably be disappointed. And if it happens enough times, we become disillusioned. We see the possibility of contentment and hope as being unattainable.

Again, “grace is God saying, ‘Here’s all the good stuff I have to give you.’ Faith is saying, ‘Thank you, I’ll take it.” Faith is the acknowledgement that circumstances (persons, place and things) are not where we place our trust. We ultimately, must place our trust in the Lord.

True happiness, joy and peace are not dependent on the circumstances of our lives. When we choose to let go of the anxieties we feel, and place our hope and trust in the Lord, he will guard our hearts, and direct our thoughts and our passions away from those external things we have been reliant on, and bring the contentment and hopefulness that are the hallmarks of the Christian life.

The thing is, we have more control over our level of contentment and hopefulness than we think. We are what we think about.  Our lives are the result of our thinking.  Many people hate their circumstances only because they’ve let them rule their lives.

One of the incredible gifts that God is constantly trying to increase in us is the gift of awareness. Question: Have we allowed the Holy Spirit to whisper in our ears, allowing us to see with a little more perspective each day the abundance with which he has blessed us?

The battle is always in our mind, so we need to tend to it. Like a garden, we need to attentively pick and prune our thoughts in order to prevent overgrowth and chaos, and we need to fertilize our minds with prayer.

Being negative and worrying is relatively easy.  Being hopeful requires work. Trusting in the Lord demands a faithful commitment, but as the scriptures remind us, that faithful commitment is well worth it!

So as we go through this week, let’s prayerfully assess how we view our circumstances.  Have we let our sense of contentment and hopefulness be contingent on those circumstances, or are we seeing them increasingly through the lens of faith, where we simply say in response to God’s grace-filled abundance, “Thanks, I’ll take it”? 

And so we pray today, “Lord, help us to simplify our lives. Strengthen our resolve to not let our circumstances rule over us. Help us instead to grow in our conviction that by holding true to your Word, not every day will be a walk in the park, but we will be able to walk with the assurance of the ultimate joy that you desire for each of us.”

Amen!