"Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God's wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.”
This is excellent. But the perspective of others can be helpful in rounding out what the experience of contentment looks like. Enter one of my favorite authors, G. K. Chesterton.
I listened to Chesterton's Miscellany of Men essays during some waking night hours over the last few weeks, and dozed off through a number of them that were a bit less than captivating (granted, the slightly dull character of a work of literature is a merit in my selection for night time listening), but while listening to The Contented Man, my mind gave a little thrill of connection. I loved Chesterton's thoughts on this. Here's some of it:
“Content” ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased; placidly, perhaps, but still positively pleased. Being contented with bread and cheese ought not to mean not caring what you eat. It ought to mean caring for bread and cheese; handling and enjoying the cubic content of the bread and cheese and adding it to your own. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it. It ought to mean appreciating what there is to appreciate in such a position; such as the quaint and elvish slope of the ceiling or the sublime aerial view of the opposite chimney-pots. And in this sense contentment is a real and even an active virtue; it is not only affirmative, but creative. The poet in the attic does not forget the attic in poetic musings; he remembers whatever the attic has of poetry; he realises how high, how starry, how cool, how unadorned and simple—in short, how Attic is the attic.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
