Contentment Where You Are is not always so easy when things are not good.

We have been through the wringer these past couple of years. Societal pressures in healthcare, politics, race relations, and talking about it all at the dinner table has shifted the way we do life. It would be easy to become nostalgic hoping for things to go back to the way we were. But God’s word to us today is to forget the former things.

One area where we tend to do this more is in our worship. The old songs, the old feeling, the old way of doing church, we miss it all.

During one captivity, the people of Israel so much wanted to go back to how things used to be. They were prepared to fight to undo their recent social shifts, but God told them to instead, settle down, accept the change. He told them to live, build houses, get married, have children, become content. This is hard to do.

I am not too terribly old, but even I will get nostalgic about things that have changed in the church since I was a child. God wants us to be content where we are and not look back. Remember, Lot’s wife, she could not accept the change that was coming so she looked back and she was instantly turned into a pillar of salt. God wants us to remember the blessings and the lessons of the past, but we must never become so enamored with what used to be that we can’t be content where we are now.

Contentment in our current place prepares us for something new. Things have changed, but God is about to do a new thing. It may feel like a wasteland right now, but God is pushing streams up through the dry ground. It is only a matter of time before the wasteland is pregnant with moisture from the fingers of God.

Discontent with the right now or an unhealthy longing for what once was will keep our hearts from believing for something better. We need faith that God is doing a new thing. When we make a segment of our past our longing, we stop longing for God. God always has something better and He must move us to contentment in the wasteland first so that His downpour will be an answer to our prayer and He will be glorified.

Prayer: Lord, teach me contentment right where I am and let me have faith for the new thing You want to do in my life. Amen.

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