THE MIRACLE OF CONTENTMENT!

Walla Walla, WA September 30, 2010 Light mist on the river, sunny and beautiful. 80+ degrees

One almost never hears anything about contentment. Our consumer culture has a vested interest in keeping us discontented. If we could be content with what we already have, we would put at risk that 70% of our Gross Domestic Product that relies on consumer consumption. George W. Bush is infamous for that tried and yet untrue gimmick of sending almost every citizen a check for several hundred dollars and then announcing to the nation:"Go Shopping!". It seemed as if we could solve our economic malaise with just a dose of unnecessary and/or deficit creating spending. It may be the favorite bailout for government economists, but the American people didn't buy it. Most of them used the money to pay off some of the debt they already had and began to change their financial lives and priorities. The ordinary working people are always far ahead of those who govern. They have figured out that you can't just keeping going deeper and deeper into debt. You have to make significant sacrifices and life alterring changes to escape the tyranny of indebtedness. They used to have paupers prisons for people who couldn't pay their debts. It's scary to think about how many people would qualify for that situation, myself included, if we had paupers prisons today. We have been working diligently for several years to eliminate all indebtedness, including our house and farm mortgages. I can't wait for the day that we can call Dave Ramsey on his TV show and do the "WE'RE DEBT FREE!" scream. Dave's motto is: "Live like no one else, so you can live like no one else!" Contentment has a lot to do with Dave's philosophy. It would appear that millions of Americans are coming to the same conclusion and they are changing their financial lifestyles. One word of caution, however. Contentment and being debt free are not automatically linked to one another. There is a deeper spiritual need that trumps both of them. The French scientist, genius, mathematician, and christian wise man Blaise Pascal, described it as "le vide". An emptiness or vacuum in the soul of everyone that is "God shaped", meaning it can only be fully filled and brought into equilibrium, when God's Spirit enters into our lives. Pascal, like millions of believers before and after him, tried to fill that emptiness with fame, fortune, pleasure and stimulants. One night in the 1650s, Blaise Pascal described his encounter with the living God as if he were describing one of his scientific experiments. He kept track of the hour and minutes. He described his physical, emotional and ultimate spiritual sensations in minute detail. "Fire, consuming fire, the God of Isaac, Jacob and the prophets is present." It wasn't some religious ritual, it was the creation of a passionately personal relationship with God that changed his life and our world. That experience was so life-transforming for Pascal, that the paper he wrote it upon was found in the hem of his one and only outer cloak after his death. It remains in a museum to this day, a living testimony of the only source of true contentment.  Like the 1960s Rolling Stones Classic declared: "I can't find, no satisfaction!" We try just about anything and everything to fill that vacuum, but it is instatiable without the presence of the eternal God who created us. The apostle Paul even used religion and self-righteousness to fill that emptiness, but in Romans 7 he despairs over his ongoing ennui: "So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!" On a journey to arrest and probably execute followers of Jesus in the city of Damascus, Saul of Tarsus was knocked on his keester, blinded by the light of the risen Christ, and overwhelmed by the grace and love of God. God said: "I want you to be my apostle to the Gentiles!". How could anyone refuse? He stumbled into the city, blind as a bat and waited for a believer named Ananias to come and give him the next clues to this life changing mystery. He would change his name to Paulus, or Paul, and in his epistle to the church at Phillipi he would write: "I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Christ who gives me strength." Phil. 4:11-13. That was what I found in the A.C. Davis High School auditorium in May of 1966. A friend named Jesus who loved me enough to die for me. A friend who just also happens to be Kurios, Lord of heaven and earth. As a wonderful songs states: "to look into your judge's face and find your savior there." I felt and knew that the Spirit of the Living God was filling that "vide" in my soul and I felt "shalom", peace and wholeness for the first time in my life.

North to Alberta! Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada Summer of 1966!

No one bothered to forewarn me about the spiritual warfare I would encounter almost immediately upon accepting Christ as my Lord and Savior. Within days, I had a girlfriend. Now that's not to imply that women are temptress' or anything like that. However, it was much more than coincidence that a friend introduced me to this girl who just happened to live down the street from me and she wanted to get to know me as more than a neighbor. Why not? I was feeling pretty lonely at the time. Many of my friends were deeply suspect of my "conversion" experience. They didn't know how to relate to me any more and so they just avoided me. There were only a couple of weeks left before I was to go to work on my brother Noel's cattle ranch in Alberta for the summer. God, I believe, had all that in the works so I would be long gone by the time holding hands turned into Friday night movie kisses. I was falling head over heals into something like love, and the best place for me that summer was 700 miles away from that overwhelming perfume and those delicious lips. But I had to get to Alberta first and that was an adventure in itself.

My mother and I packed what things we thought I would need for working on a real Canadian cattle ranch and we drove to Seattle to say farewell to my father who was working for Boeing Aircraft Company. The next morning, Mom and I boarded the passenger train in Seattle northbound for Vancouver, B.C. It was a spectacular ride along the inland waterways and we got to Vancouver around 11 am. Unfortunately, the only return train left in 30 minutes, so all Mom had time to do was help me get my baggage into the terminal, give me a couple of dollars for food and wish me a good summer in Alberta. She caught the train back to Seattle and I was left alone, 15 years old, in the middle of a strange city in a foreign country. I cring today thinking about the risks that would be present if a parent did that today with their 15 year old. Well, I made the best of it. I went up to the counter and showed the attendant my ticket to Medicine Hat and they told me to take my baggage down to the appropriate place to get it checked in. That was a relief. I was now free from dragging all that stuff around the rest of the day. My train east didn't leave for several hours, so I decided to explore the great city of Vancouver B.C. School was still in session in Canada, so I got a lot of strange looks from people wondering why I wasn't in a classroom somewhere. On second thought, maybe it was the goofy cowboy hat I had dug out of the closet back in Wapato that I was wearing that got the strange looks. After a little while I realized I was hungry, so I went back to the terminal and sat down in the restaurant to eat. I had had one year of French language instruction in 9th grade so I could understand Soupe du Jour and some of the other things on the menu. Officially, everything in Canada was supposed to be printed in both English and French, so I knew that I would learn alot of new vocabulary that summer. As it turned out, that wasn't all I was about to be exposed to. After hanging around all afternoon in the terminal, we boarded the train in the evening and headed east. It took all night and then another whole day to get to Medicine Hat. Spiritual warfare #2 popped up on the train. I met an immigrant who was from some Slavic country. The only language we both could speak the other person understood was French. In my halting French, we got along and tried to visit with each other from time to time. The next afternoon, he invited me to sit next to him because he had something he wanted to show me. He pulled out these really disgusting porno magazines, assuming that any manly red-blooded American 15 year old cowboy would love to take a look. Spiritual temptations come in many forms and when you least expect them. As tired and sleep deprived as I was, I had the common sense to decline his offer and went back to my own seat. We were leaving Calgary at the time and we would get to "The Hat" in a few hours. Pulling into the terminal in Medicine Hat, I was relieved to see my brother Noel standing on the plarform to greet me. What a relief! Time to go to the Ranch and sleep in a real bed and not a train seat or the floor. A totally new culture and life awaited me on the Canadian Prairies.