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Hey Reader, Welcome to your weekly dose of Biblical contentment. Here are your three contentment-related thoughts for today. Something for you to : read | do | pray READ THIS I can still remember the day, the afternoon, the moment even, very vividly. We were living in France, where I was completing my Ph.D. One of the things I realized very early (like day one of each class), was I was behind essentially all my classmates on the actual subject matter of our courses. A business Ph.D. is intended to create researchers. The end produce is professors who will teach others, but also (and more importantly to most including my program) push the envelope of what is known. Research is the way the theories that are taught to business students come to be, and that is where the real work happens. Many days I would have many ~40-page, dense research articles I was expected to read, analyze, and be able to discuss. I also had the stress of feeling like I just couldn’t swing some of the coursework. I remember going to the head of my program and telling him that it seemed like I just couldn’t hack it. I had been getting grades like12/20 and on one exam (I think it was something like multivariate regression analysis – which honestly, I now barely remember what that even is) I had failed. You needed 10/20 to pass, and I got a 9. I had NEVER tried as hard as I was then, and I had never had the sense of ‘I just don’t get it’. At the same time, our kids were not necessarily thriving in French public school, an environment that still uses public shaming as a pedagogical method. Some teachers felt there was something wrong with our kids for being at the bottom of the class for reading skills (we tended to think it was because we had thrown them into a new school system in a language they didn’t know…but I guess we can agree to disagree on that one). I was getting our kids from the village school, driving along a tiny one-way road lined with plane trees on both sides. Directly in front, at what eppeared to be the end of a road was a 17th century church. It looked like originally the road went up to the door of the church and stopped, but now it jogged over, just around the corner of the church (literally, with many scrapes on the centuries-old stone on the corner of the church where people had slightly misread the corner) I was probably late, and was just managing this chicane in our beat-up used Renault mini-van when a motorbike came around the corner of the church towards me. I slammed on the brakes, as did he, but the lack of four wheels to balance on meant he lost his balance, and slid on the ground, scraping across the pavement and coming to a halt under the front of my car. Once realizing no one was hurt, I got a little perturbed. What the heck was he doing darting out around the corner, GOING THE WRONG WAY ON A ONE-WAY STREET? He then proceeded to point out a sign, buried in the hedge on the other side of the barely-big-enough-for-one-car road, indicating to be careful of oncoming traffic. Not only that, but I had to yield right-of-way to oncoming traffic.
Cue a rather deep searching of soul, ending with essentially a brake-down. So friend…..I’ve been there. Feeling like you just can’t do what you’re supposed to do. What others think you should be able to. What you think you ought to. What everyone else seems to be able to do. When you get there -I think there’s one way out. Accept the fact that you don’t perform your way through life. Realize you don’t achieve your worth. Be honest about the fact that your ability to get things done is not what will bring you contentment. We must accept that contentment is not correlated to our accomplishments.
DO THIS What have you failed at recently? How much of your contentment has been lost by that ‘I’m a failure’ feeling? How much of your value and your worth has been lost? Sit for a minute to just dwell on the reality that you are not valuable to God because of what you can do. How you can perform. How good you do your tasks. Nothing more. Nothing less.
PRAY THIS Lord, you have made me who I am. Talk to you next Thursday! ~George |
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