Radical Contentment
I lack nothing.
– Psalm 23
Why is contentment so elusive? We always want something. Maybe it’s because we live in a world of endless options, bathed in constant advertising. Maybe it’s because of the way social media makes it easy to compare our worst moments with other people’s curated best ones. Maybe it’s simply something in the human condition, this feeling that I will be happier when__, the impulse that made Eve reach for the fruit in the middle of a garden that already had all she needed.
The truth is, we believe we’ll be happier when our circumstances change—when we have a particular schedule, or item, or outcome, or feeling, or experience; when we change something about ourselves or someone else. I have labored under this belief so often in my life, in major and minor ways. Sometimes I’ve felt like contentment is just one dessert or bag or shower away. Sometimes I’ve desired intensely to lose weight or get a dog or finish a test, believing that the happiness I want would be just on the other side.
Not that it’s bad to desire things, but when I hinge my happiness on them, I inevitably discover that any such feeling they bring is temporary. Sure, the happiness happens, maybe even a moment of conscious contentment. But just as surely, it wears off. Once the novelty fades, I simply find myself with a new set of benefits and challenges. Not all my problems are fixed: they just look different. And I slowly begin to want something else.
I’ve been thinking on Psalm 23, a familiar set of verses that have taken a fresh appearance after reading W. Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks At Psalm 23. If you know sheep (which I don’t, but Keller does), you’ll recognize what a radical statement that very first line is: I lack nothing. Sheep lack everything. There’s no such thing as wild sheep for a reason. On their own, sheep have no defense against predators, leading to a timidity so great that a squirrel jumping out of a bush is enough to trigger a frightful stampede. On their own, sheep fall prey to all kinds of parasites and flies, the most common of which burrow through their noses and drive them to distraction, causing them to beat their heads against trunks or rub against bushes to obtain relief. On their own, sheep are incapable of finding food or water; creatures of habit, they will wear down the same route long after the water has been polluted and the fresh grass is gone. On their own, sheep live under the constant tension of the “butting order” within a herd, always challenging or being challenged in a shifting social hierarchy.
Sheep lack defenses, resources, and peace. They are driven by their appetites, fears, and habits. David, a shepherd by vocation, knows this. And yet he writes words that not even those of us with far more capabilities would utter: I lack nothing. This kind of contentment is complete. It is not a momentary feeling or an occasional occurrence. It is a state of being, an unequivocal statement of truth. How can this be? What is his secret?
On their own, sheep lack everything. But when they have a good shepherd, they lack nothing. That’s David’s secret, the first five words of the Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd.
“Circumstances are fine to hope for, but not to hope in.”
There are two basic assumptions in those words that are completely revolutionary to our customary way of thinking. The first is that we need a shepherd. We generally like to feel we are in control. Happiness is something we procure, and there are hordes of ads and life coaches and books to tell us how to do it. But the very first thing we must see here is that contentment never comes through anything we can achieve or acquire for ourselves. Better circumstances are fine to hope for, but not to hope in, because, for one thing, they always change. For another, they don’t reach deep enough to address the real problem of our malcontent: our inner insecurities, fears, restlessness, insatiable longings. The best circumstances are only a salve for or an escape from these things; they never really cure them. We are helpless to do that on our own, as the endlessly cyclical search for contentment proves.
Which brings us to the second truth: there is a good shepherd.
Honestly, when I began to understand what it is a shepherd does for their sheep, I wondered why anyone would bother. Shepherds guard their sheep on constant, armed alert, sometimes sleeping with them overnight. They scout out terrain in advance to plan grazing patterns and remove poisonous plants. They apply insect-repellant ointments and dips; they cultivate the green pastures not naturally found in semi-arid climates. They discipline and groom and guide and rescue. Certainly not all shepherds go to the trouble, but the good ones do all this and more at great labor and cost to themselves. This is the great truth upon which the rest of the Psalm is a meditation: God is my good shepherd. Jesus laid down his life for his sheep.
Contentment as a state-of-being is a paradigm shift. It is a realization that I am in the active, steadfast, loving, powerful care of someone who knows who I am and what I need better than I know it myself. He gives me nothing that I cannot handle and withholds nothing that I truly need. Contentment as dependent-on-circumstances results in the conflagration of desire: the constant focus upon and fanning of the flames of what I want, which is never enough. Contentment as described by David results in the transformation of desire, the ability to rest in what I find before me.
The more we look to ourselves, the more we are driven by the vicissitudes of our desires as informed and inflamed by the world around us, the more elusive true contentment becomes. But the more we know our good shepherd, the more we can enumerate all the ways he provides for us through the seasons of the year, as David goes on to do, the more we are able to enter into contentment as a way of living.
