I’ll never forget the moment I realized I was perhaps a bit too content with my life. I was in my mid-thirties. The windows of my spacious home were wide open to the smells and sounds of a welcomed spring day as I sat with a steaming cup of coffee in hand looking out. I had arrived. The family, the house, the neighborhood, and everything in between. I was living the life I had always wanted right down to the white picket fence that lined my yard. At that moment I was content, comfortable and happy. I felt safe and secure. My life was an Instagram worthy picture that could have been captioned with the hashtag, “blessed.” I had done it, or rather, God had done it, and a feeling of contentment began to settle in. I was living the American dream.  

As time went on that contentment turned to confusion. Was this all there was to life? Was I truly happy? What was next or was there even much of a next? I began to take these thoughts to God and before I knew it He was opening up an opportunity that would shatter any illusion of contentment I was currently living in. As a family we had the opportunity to move across the country and do some missions work that was entirely out of our comfort zone. It would require us to uproot our life as we knew it and step into the unknown. It would not be easy or comfortable but somehow, deep down, I felt a longing and assurance as the Holy Spirit whispered to my soul  “just go.”  

There is a danger in settling into contentment and comfort when we feel a stirring in our soul from the Lord. For us, there were a million reasons we could have said no. The house, the great job, the kid’s school, the insurance, and family and friends all around. But, we chose to step out of the life of contentment we were living to see if there might possibly be more the Lord wanted for us and from us. As we sold most of our things and traded our spacious home in the North for a high-rise city apartment in the deep South, I wasn’t sure if anything could possibly be better than what we had. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The 3 years that followed for our family will likely be remembered as our most cherished years together. It turns out, there was far more that God had for us and had we chosen to stay put because of fear of the unknown and a deep level of contentment, we would have missed out on some of the best years of our lives.    

I am always encouraged by C.S Lewis’s words in his book The Weight of Glory where he says:

“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.”   

A Holiday at the Sea, what could be better? And yet, in so many areas of my life I am content with the slum. It is so easy to use our perceived happiness as an excuse to not step into some of the more scary and unknown things the Lord may be calling us to do. We, in our humanness, don’t realize that God may have so much more He is wanting to do in us. We settle because it is easy and familiar and we miss out on that “holiday at the sea”.  

God won’t ask us all to move across the country and do missions work but He does have great purpose for His glory for each of us. It might be something as simple as walking across the street and meeting the new neighbor or considering the needs of the community around us in light of our giftings. We will never know what He wants to do unless we ask Him and then take the risk no matter how big or small it feels. You may find, there is so much more waiting just around the corner of our contentment.  

 “....And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”  Ephesians 3:17-21