Not Waiting for Contentment
Vermeer’s Milkmaid, Cassatt’s Young Mother Sewing, Renoir’s Gabrielle et Jean, Leighton’s
Music Lesson: works of art that emit an impression of contentment to the viewer. We know little of the lives of the subjects. If a photographer followed me around all day, there is a chance that he might catch an image of me wiping the counter with an air of contentment. But the problem with art is that the real artistry is being done where no painter can observe. True contentment will not be witnessed in the look on my face when I’m cleaning up vomit or gassing up the car.
Jeremiah Burroughs in his book The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment says: “Be sure of your call to every business you go about. Though it is the least business, be sure of your call to it; then, whatever you meet with, you may quiet your heart with this: I know I am where God would have me.”
This is a large lesson.
The memories of my childhood contain an over-arching presence of a mother who was truly content. “We are so rich,” she would say as I mumbled about the lack of chocolate chips in our chocolate chip cookies, or as I sulked over my reflection. I was under the tutelage of a master of contentment, not through her own striving, but through her rest in God and His provision and plan for her life. She walked with the contentment of someone who didn’t look at the prices in the grocery store. She only looked at the prices when she had to put the groceries back. And then she would praise the Lord.
Ease does not bring contentment. My childish heart would look at Milkmaid and surmise that if I had those authentic earthen vessels, I too would contentedly pour the milk. Can a Christian living below the poverty line truly be content? What about the concept of striving for excellence? What about Proverbs 31? How can I survey the land and buy it if I can’t afford the land? These are questions I had pondered and my
discontentment grew as I supposed that only those who have been also given riches can be given contentment. Not so.
Again, Burroughs: “If I become content by having my desire satisfied, that is only
self-love; but when I am contented with the hand of God and am willing to be at His disposal, that comes from my love to God.”
So contentment, true contentment, is not the presence of material and self-satisfaction as we are tempted to believe, but the presence of Christ.
A couple of years ago I painstakingly etched in wood and hung above my kitchen sink a quote by Theresa of Avila, a motherless invalid who penned “Know that even when you are in the kitchen, our Lord moves midst the pots and pans”. Not as an homage to
an ascetic influence, but as a reminder that contentment is not found in the absence of hardship (it would be a deception to imply that a sink full of pots and pans is not a hardship for most of us at the end of a long day), but contentment is found in Christ. So let the painter observe, and the subject pour the milk, or sew, or sit with the child, and be still, for He is God.
