Anyway, I'm not writing to give excuses today. I'm writing to tell all you people about something I've learned over the last couple months (and am still learning).
Back in February, I was reading through Philippians for devotions and I hit Philippians 4:11. It goes something like this:
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.
That verse has been haunting me ever since.
Of course, there's the initial conviction of "Wow, I'm not even in prison and I'm unhappy with stuff in my life!" But this particular thing turned into more than that.
Last month, our family went down to Florida for about a week as a vacation. After the first couple days, one of my sisters got sick. I followed the next day. It just felt like a really bad cold, so we kept going to Disney and Universal and just took cold medicine like it was going out of style. A couple days later, one of the boys started getting sick. Our last day there, five of us were down and we couldn't leave the house.
When we got home, we figured out that we had all caught strep throat and that was why our symptoms were so weird. Eventually, people started getting better, but I couldn't seem to quite kick it. That may or may not have been partially due to my insistence upon playing soccer a few days after we got back. Anyway, I was down for a while longer than everyone else and ended up with a small sinus infection just to make things more interesting. Strep sapped my energy and made me achy and tired - essentially to the point of not wanting to move very much.
(I promise there is a point to this long and rambling story.)
Once I finally got better, I started going for my morning runs again. I hadn't run for a couple months because of shin splints and it was incredibly exciting to finally be able to get back into it. Unfortunately, four days in, I injured my neck pretty badly. I was stretching to loosen up and something popped, leading to pain, blacking out, and the inability to move my head.
That meant a week and a half of laying in bed with no running, no soccer, no driving, and no school. For the first few days, I couldn't even hold up a book long enough to read.
Hours upon hours of Netflix in bed was not how I had imagined spending that time and I wasn't happy. At the end of the first week I ended up crying just because I didn't think I could take the pain and the helplessness and frustration any more.
Back to Philippians.
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.
That was some situation I was in. Paul probably didn't want to be in prison any more than I wanted to be sick or stuck in bed. But he was able to say that he was content. I wasn't.
But that verse just kept coming back to me.
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.
I had a plan for all that time I was out of commission and it did not involve being sidelined. God had a different plan though and guess what - His won.
This post is about contentment. I wasn't content with my circumstances and situation, but God's been working on me. I have by no means perfected this quality - far from it. But now I'm on the lookout for ways to be content in whatever situation I am.
-Kira
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