The question of contentment?

The other night a fellow missionary asked me how I deal with the issue of contentment. He had noticed that most of the missionaries have a very negative outlook on the country, ministry, people… He told me that we seemed to be content in our situation and was curious how that was.

I think missionaries are no different than anyone else. They have the same hang ups, the same problems as you would see in the states. Many people are so driven by how they think ministry should be done, so blinded by how they think God has “told” them to minister that they become unwilling or resentfully flexible, a new sort of individualized legalism. It is such an easy trap that leads to discontentment which opens the door to other in country irritations. It is easy to move from, “they run this ministry in such an ungodly way” to “this country is so backwards in its thinking they should do it this way…” Negative attitudes toward people move toward a habit of negative attitudes towards more people. This hits a little closer to home for me when I think of Kids Alive and the grievances I have with that ministry. I cannot let hurts of the past turn into a path of negativity toward my circumstances.

I believe the best I can hope for is that in every situation I choose that which in my heart of hearts I think is the right thing to do, the thing that lines up with scripture as best as I understand it. This is a choice for myself that I cannot hold all people to. I must make my decisions humbly. My choice may be wrong, I cannot always know absolute right but I can know what I think is the right thing even if at times it seems arbitrary. This is the key to contentment that I must look to every day. When I look back on decisions that seem to have gone awry, I can take comfort in the fact that when I made the decision I honestly thought I was choosing right. I may choose differently now but I need not regret my previous decisions. God give me, give all us the wisdom to see the right we should do, the character to choose it and the strength to endure in it.

-Eric