Learning the Joy of Contentment

In her book, Seeking God, Esther de Waal describes the problems with the excessive freedom of our lifestyle choices:

"Simply at the level of working out an acceptable life-style the choices have now become quite bewildering. Shall I support Mother Teresa in Calcutta or help leprous children in Tanzania...I may well end up flitting form one to the other until I have collected a tagbag for myself of well-intentioned but half-thought-out ideals based on a confused and superficial amalgam of some of the more attractive elements in each. The danger then of course that I become too confused and superficial.
Instead of this bewildering and exhausting rushing from one thing to another monastic stability means accepting this particular community, this place and these people, this and no other, as the way of God."

The book is on what we can learn from The Rule of Saint Benedict, so don't let the word "monastic" throw you off. Christians should be the most stable people in the world. We are built on the Rock, after all. This doesn't mean we will be born and die in the same place, the ideals of Wendell Berry notwithstanding. I am a transplant to the Northwest after six generations of living in northern Alabama, after all. But we should not easily flit from one place to another, from one church to another, or from one cause to another. God has called us wherever we are right now.

We are called to love our neighbors in front of us first, before giving to and thinking about our invisible neighbors across the world. When we discipline ourselves to give to our church, our neighbors, and our family, one of the by-products is the joy of contentment.