Reflection - Contentment and Work

Context

This verse showing up in Spurgeon's Morning and Evening is a divine grace to me. Today is a significant day in a journey God has had me on towards contentment. The circumstances of that journey, the specifics, are known to some but I can still speak generally enough about it in this reflection because the generalities are not unique to me - anymore than the requirement to learn contentment, for it's not a natural state for a man.

For me, like a lot of others, it's about money right now. Over the last few years I've been able to make a pretty significant income and God has blessed me through the work I've done, but something I have noticed is the work itself has felt less and less blessed, and more like a burden as the goal became money. I want to be a billionaire and never concern myself with a financial struggle - but this is childish thinking. The last few years have shown me that I can work, a lot, and make money, also a lot (relatively speaking). I don't feel as though I've wasted time necessarily, the amount of work and the time the work takes are different things. But where I may have recovered some of the time in overworking, I certainly gave up other things: fulfilment and excellence to name the top 2. As I've not been content, and have striven for more it's become clear that wanting more is itself a burden.

Today marks the end of some income that I've been able to work for - not all of it, I'm extremely blessed in cat-autonomy-2-0. The facts are though that through the circumstances God has brought me recently, I'll be making less than 50% of what I've been able to make over the last couple years... By God's grace we still have more than enough, and by his grace again today is a significant day for me to step through a doorway of contentment and officially realign my work priorities with the worldview Jesus has called me into.

Contentment and Work

I have been sort of fighting off a belief that I'm on a literal mission from God in Caterpillar Autonomy... If someone could see my inner-monologue play out they'd certainly get Blues Brothers vibes...

I hope I'm not just reaching for some grand facetious meaning for the work I'm now doing to distract myself from the changes coming to my paycheck. It really feels to me like God has prepared me in many ways for the work that's in front me. I'm thankful for that preparation and now it seems like it's time to give up the desires for riches and focus on doing something more than closing tickets and supporting a small team of people.

As God calls me to contentment in my personal life, I think he's also planning on blessing the work I'm doing. Earlier I said I have been very blessed by the work I have been able to do, but I don't know that God has blessed the work itself - much of what I've done was filled with mistakes you only learn by doing something the first time... Certainly in some ways he has blessed those things, but I see something "just bigger" in Cat Autonomy, and I think I'm here to play a real role in it

I've had to give-up some pay to play that role, but the Lord has taught (and is teaching) me that there's much more to work than a paycheck, more to life than money.

It is easy, very easy, for me to roll out of this line-of-thinking, I've done it several times even while writing this... but I am sure contentment is something the Lord has for me. Today's significance is just a temporal milestone, a date that was approaching at a constant rate of change... The day is here, today's meditation is on contentment, and the Lord is doing a work in and through me. Amen.