Want Things

Discovering What Contentment Really Means

For a long time, I've mistakenly believed that contentment is simply the absence of desire.

In other words, to be content is not to want anything too badly. Forget ambition, drive, or an inquisitive thought life. To be content is to be unencumbered by the need for anything else. (Other than God, of course) After all, the most content people on earth ought to be Christians . . . or so I once thought.

Because of this, I always thought there was something inherently wrong with me. If to be content was never to want anything but God, I lived every day of my life for as long as I can remember, decidedly discontent.

As an artist and an INFJ, this meant a double dose of guilt. My angst to create, my perpetual dissatisfaction with my work, and, of course, my “what if?” life mantra didn't exactly fit the mold of what I thought a spiritually mature Christian should be.

How could I want more than Jesus? How could I desire more from my life than what I had been given?

The question haunted me like a stray cat who’s been fed by a stranger. It lingers around in alleyways, and in the shadows, creeping up to the back door and peeking through the window because, that one time, you fed it. It always remembers. And so, exasperated and slightly guilty, you feed it again. The cat begins to guard your door and never lets you pass without letting out a pity-evoking purr of dissatisfaction. After all, you've fed it once and now twice. It was only a matter of time before you’ll do it again.

I must be the most un-spiritual person in the world. I want a career. I want success. I want a healthy, stable family, a great marriage, a savings account that actually contained savings. I want a way to have it all and to orchestrate it all. But the nagging discontent remains . . . and I was always guilty of feeding it.

I’m not sure when it happened. I want to say it was a gradual realization, but in actuality, the epiphany landed square on my shoulder like some sort of trained bird only a few mornings ago as I was getting ready. This is how I know I can take no credit for its appearance.

It said, “Contentment is not the absence of desire or want, it is simply placing all of those longings into the right hands.”

I dropped my mascara brush in into the sink. I frantically tried to find a scrap of paper to write it all down.

The truth, like an unexpected summer rain, washed over me. It was a gift that I never thought would come. It continued, firmly, but inaudibly,

Stop trying to purge your desire. Wanting things makes us human. Not to want anything (“having everything”) is its own kind of hell because until we step over the precipice of eternity, our very bones will long for a better country. The answer to discontentment isn't to stop wanting things. It is to understand that you are ultimately not in charge of fulfilling those desires. You are not strong enough to hold them on your own. Entrust your unfulfilled desires—your dreams deferred, prayers unanswered, plans shaken, preparations disappointed and relationships unrealized—to the One who is able to carry them. This is the substance and hope of true contentment.

So go ahead. Want things. Take risks. Be vulnerable. Love people without holding back. But realize that the outcome of every desire rests on One Person and one person only. Finding true contentment and lasting peace means that that person is no longer you.

Thank God, because I still want a lot of things. The difference is that now, those desires bring freedom instead of guilt because I can credit both their inception and fulfillment to an infinite and thoroughly capable God . . . a God who creates desires and brings them to pass in His perfect wisdom and timing.

704 Levinsey Lane* is situated precariously on backburner of the the metroplex — caught between the monotony of the suburbs and the rapturous enthralls of country life. Rows of houses all stand at attention on the horizon, rudely interspersed by grazing pastures, the crinkled brows of last season’s crops, and several mid-century farmhouses which stand in stubborn refusal to the formidable force of urbanization.

The street is neat and ordered with newly constructed houses, all with exactly two adolescent trees supported by wire and stakes. The grass in each yard bears the indentations where it was rolled out in fibrous sod blankets, seams aligned like a neatly pleated skirt.

The houses face one another in an awkward standoff, not unlike the meeting of two teenage girls in the hallway who realize they’re wearing the exact same back-to-school outfit from Kohl’s.

To the right of our lot is the concave nothingness of a drainage plain, where no one is allowed to build. It’s the ugly bald spot of the neighborhood where the remains of construction sites go to die. On any given day, one can venture to find at least four 7-Eleven “big gulp” cups, about 1,000 cigarette butts, and at least a dozen unidentifiable species of plants in and around the ravine. The soggy base is occupied by a concrete trench half-full of stagnant water.

My home is exactly the fifth on the right, the single story one with the dormers in the attic to make you believe there’s another floor. The oxblood bricks are dappled with purple and beige, oddly reminiscent of an Indian blanket.

The front door opens to a modest, but spacious abode, carpeted in warm brown medium pile, tiled with taupe and still with the faint scent of newness.

The orange remains of a deceased goldfish cracker pepper the odd corner of the dining room where my son enacted its merciful execution, along with an unfortunate Cheerio or two. I imagine their bloodcurdling cries as his fat little fingers pinch their fins off one by one between gurgling mouthfuls of apple juice and drool. I roll out the vacuum to mark the gravesite, using the indentation of the wheels to chalk off the crime scene.

The kitchen is the epicenter of the house, the mitochondrial mechanism of an open-concept plan that unites all the space together. Last night’s dishes are only partially done, my half-hearted homage to the scolding goddesses of American domesticity. My station at the sink overlooks the living area, the kitchen table, the four windows that gaze into our backyard.

My bare feet discover the sticky remnants of some unidentifiable entity, which is most likely maple syrup from Sunday night’s French-Toast- For-Dinner-Revolution. (I carry a damp washcloth wherever I go.)

The refrigerator is full of hopeful meals. Meticulous plans were made, organic vegetables purchased, and painstakingly arranged in a colorful cornucopia. Sometimes they end up in a lovely soup or as the stars of a delightful weeknight dinner. More likely, though, a frozen mozzarella and pesto pizza and a six-pack of Shiner graces our garage sale kitchen table instead.

Potted succulents are sprinkled about, a nod to the west Texas landscape I have yet to see and a eulogy to the coniferous North Carolina forests of my youth. How do you keep these things alive anyway? Water, sunlight, and a climate-controlled habitat don’t seem like enough to keep them happy.

Beyond the summery scent of the honeysuckle candle, faint notes of cinnamon, and vanilla, (also from the Revolution) hang nostalgically in the air.

These sandstone colored walls are my recovery. My solace. My inroad to sanity. Within them my tender birthright of imperfection is accepted — even loved — and every single hungry ant is sure to stumble upon a feast.

*This is not my real address . . . so if you show up at my doorstep with chocolates and flowers (I like to assume the best) then you will be sorely disappointed.

Created in WELD Writers Club

I am from long rows of yellow corn

and tobacco plants peeping lazily

over slinking country roads.

I am from the cavernous echoes of bleachers,

the lights of high school football fields.

I am from strong, silent types,

recovering alcoholic types,

save- old- bananas types.

I am from line-dried clothes

and the feeling of pine needles

underneath bare feet.

From long, unsupervised summers

mixed with chlorine,

brown shoulders

and Truth or Dare.

I am from yellowed, earmarked pages

and swinging hammocks in the dark.

I am from the Christ-haunted South,

full of the saved and the damned

gathered awkwardly together

by the river.

I am from groceries

left on the front porch by neighbors.

(Frosted Flakes, mostly.)

I am from my father,

a cast-iron skillet,

a locomotive train,

the laugh with your eyes type.

From my mother,

the tender artist

and the bird whisperer.

I am from overcrowded vehicles

windows down,

sticky fingerprints on the door handles

My grandfather was an orphan during the Depression,

and then Fought Nazis in France,

later becoming a small-town legend.

But I only knew him as a jellybean connoisseur,

a gardener,

a numismatist.

This is where we reside: in others’ memories of us

Perched in a high chair,

Blushing after a first kiss behind a bookshelf,

A wrinkled hand extended

to grasp a smooth one

The Boy and the Fountain

There was a day three or four years ago where I was sitting in a park in New York City with some friends. I don’t remember if we were in Brooklyn or Queens . . . or even everything we had done earlier in the day.

I only remember sitting on the rim of an empty fountain, tweed coat wrapped around me, watching the people that passed by.

At the time, I had the luxury of having friends who didn't feel the need to talk incessantly. Even the extrovert among us was silent, the embers of his clove cigar smoldering slowly as spicy sweet smoke lazily curled up around us.

Our feet dangled in the belly of the empty fountain the bricks below faded from summers of being filled with cloudy water.

It was late afternoon and the light fell down in shards around us, golden and faintly ethereal.

Street lights began blinking on, one by one.

The trees were still naked, their twiggy appendages stretching up to pay homage to the azure sky.

The silence broke when we heard the giggles of a child of about two who had been lowered into the empty fountain . . . which served as a corral for his blue rubber ball that he threw, giggled, and subsequently chased after.

All three of us watched the child, a little boy with the gait of a baby animal I couldn't determine, toddle around triumphantly with his blue ball.

Another couple, a middle-aged man walking a jubilant cocker spaniel stopped to watch the boy and his love affair.

The dog lunged, whined, and pulled on the leather leash. The blue ball was also beckoning to him.

The man relented after a nod of approval from the boy’s parents and the dog scrambled down to join the parade around the fountain.

The boy squealed with delight at his new companion, and teetered around, keeping one foot planted like a ship’s rudder and reeling the rest of his body in a circle as the dog excitedly pounced around him.

The blue ball left his small hand and rolled to the other side of the fountain. The dog and the boy pursued it, his laughter filling the twilight of the day with a joy that was almost tangible.

We sat and watched the boy for what seemed like hours, completely enraptured by his freedom

Allyn put out his clove. Tiffany folded her hands in her lap. And I, gathered up those moments and put them in the pockets of my coat. Their beauty made them heavy, substantial, like rocks from a garden given to you by a child.

Over that span of time that was timeless, I saw many people stop — some for a moment, and some for several. Everyone watched the boy and the dog, and everyone could be seen envying them.

We bore back the waves of our lives and stood tall on them. For once, fearless. For once, and all at once, free.

I will never forget that day for as long as I live.

Again, the pull time beckoned us away from the fountain. We stood up, stiff after many minutes spent motionlessness with baited breath.

We shuffled away down the long, lonely streets of the city, feeling like we had seen a glimpse of something miraculous. Beauty does that. It makes us feel alienated and strange by our own ugliness . . . and then enveloped suddenly by something undeniable and sacred, something that is anything but ourselves.

It weighs us, measures us, and presses us down, hoping to extract some gratitude for its presence.

Created in the WELD Writer’s Club

Dear Optiflow Black,

I hate your name, but I love you.

Do you remember the day we first met?

There I was: the restless, 23-year-old version of myself, crammed in a moldy cubical, sifting through papers that needed to be copied.

Shrouded by fluorescently-lit misery, I was quietly ascending to the apex of mediocrity when you appeared to me among a stack of indiscriminate office supplies.

There were several of you—red, blue, and black—neatly snuggled in your box, sleek and nonchalant, supremely confident in your smoothly engineered encasement, your clever transparent cap, your aerodynamic torpedo-like body, your ) your beautiful 0.5 millimeter mouth .

I selected black—the only possible color for “serious writers” and began to dance with you on a page of acid free, moleskin paper.

Your ink glided effortlessly from your ebony well of possibility. I marveled at your agility, your balance—the way you never puddled or smudged.

I never had to push you out of the gate or urge you forward. You skipped down the page with ease and perfect control.

Your clean lines gave order to my chaotic thoughts. Your tidy edges deciphered my scrawling penmanship and somehow refined it.

It’s hard to believe we've been together for over four years now.

I've carried you on airplanes, to foreign countries, and trips to the grocery store.

But in all reality, dear Optiflow, it’s you who have carried me.

Past insecurities, obscurities, depression and doubt.

Past crinkled brow rows of critics and unrelenting pragmatists.

You rouse my inner poet and assure me that the dance doesn't always have to make sense.

I am eternally grateful and remain forever yours,

Suzanne

Created for the WELD Writer’s Club.

She smiled as she said these things. She laughed easily. Her threats were like honey hardening . . . sweet to the taste, but enough to choke you if you waited too long to swallow.

Bless your little hearts.

I sat in the back in navy blue Nike warm ups, hair in a pony tail — the usual nonchalant student-athlete vibes.

After class she gathered all the other athletes — the lanky runners, the sturdy volleyball players, the sleepy-eyed football guys — and told us what she expected of us from the class.

She joked, but she was serious. Every assignment must be turned in early. No excuses. Games, practices, and travel were not valid reasons. Unless you were bleeding or in the hospital, there weren’t any loopholes.

It was terrifying.

“I love athletes, but you’re going to have to work harder than anyone else to pass this class,” she said, tapping her red pen on the podium.

“By the way, I’ll be at your games.”

As the semester rolled along, I sank deeply into the readings, a warm blanket over me that I had shed during adolescence and replaced haphazardly with a soccer ball . . .

Note: This is an excerpt from a piece I’m working on in the WELD Writer’s Club. More to come!

They say that the only two fears innate in human beings are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. The rest of our fears, we learn.

I first started learning to fear at three years old, when it was time for bed.

I had reoccurring nightmares that made bedtime a petrifying ordeal. As soon as my eyes would close and my consciousness slip away, the world of my imagination, once a welcomed repose, transformed into a place I was held hostage.

Instead of rest, I shivered with raw and trembling anticipation of what I would see.

Yellow cat eyes illuminated in the fog of night. My bedroom window was proppedd open and I looked out to see them, the cats, slinking around the sandbox, occasionally looking up at me as if to say, “This is just the beginning of your night.”

My three-year-old dream-self grasped the window frame and peered out at wild the cats prowling. I shuddered because even as they slinked and paced, they never stopped looking at me.

We were in Indonesia and although I don’t remember much about it, I do remember the fear that permeated my family’s experience there.

My mom told me stories several years later of all the nights our house was broken into. She would be up nursing my newborn brother in a rocking chair while shadowed figures cut through our screens and let themselves in.

She told me how she held her breath while my father confronted the knife-wielding assailant who came to steal odds and ends: dishes, a bag or rice, forks and spoons.

We were white, which meant we were believed to be rich. I guess Indonesians had never heard of missionaries.

I suppose that even at that young age, I sensed my mother’s fear. Her thirty year-old self, newly married, newly maternal, vulnerable in a world that seemed so hostile to her help. Her vulnerability scared me. . Her quivering voice that said, “It’s going to be okay” gave me little reassurance because I knew she was lying. She had to.

Eventually, we moved back to the States, the nightmares stopped, and I grew up.

But when I think about what scares me the most, it’s still the same: the frailty of my mother, the strongest person I have ever known.

When she is unsteady or unsure, I feel myself blow away—a leaf at the mercy of the wind. I’m that three-year-old child, staring out the window in her dream at menacing cats with big, sulfur-colored eyes that only seem to grow wider.

I believe that we learn to fear just like we learn to love, from the people that represent fear and love to us.

Fear shapes things into the images of our mothers and fathers, our neighbors, our disapproving gods.

This is why we often fear who and what we love the most.

Just the other day I heard someone mention their disdain for a certain online publication because of the lengthy sections of text. It was a magazine.

“I mean, I’d just rather watch a video. I’m not going to take the time to read all of that. It’s sooo boring!”

Exactly. Of course you won’t. You hedonistic, Ritalin-infused ignoramus. (Honesty has always been my worst quality.)

To be fair, I suppose I rushed to judgment. Reading, after all, is not for the faint of heart.

Needless to say, this person immediately became unattractive to me in every way possible.

Ok Ugly Brain. You can go consume something from the freezer aisle and leave me alone with my elitist words. Oh God, America is so dumb.

Then I remembered that when I was a child, I read books.

I read and read and read.

My mother read to me every night. Little House In the Big Woods, first grade.Lord of the Rings, fourth grade. Chronicles of Narnia, every year in between.

My mother read books to me. I read books.

These are the simple reasons why I write. These are the reasons that so many who write were able to find their voices.

We were given light, and pages with bindings, and gentle watering from parents and teachers. We knew writing was important because we grew up reveling in its magic.

Kurt Vonnegut once (and many times more) said something profound:

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

A miracle. There you have it. Something that defies the limitations of the physical world is going on when we gain access to and respect for words. We are experiencing something that sadly, most people never do . . . an invitation to travel beyond the limitations of our own lives.

Why write? Oh, the answer seems simple to me: So that our children may know and grasp it’s rare and life-giving power . . . the same enchantment that I experience—and still do—when words lie, safe and still in the palms of my hands.

This piece was created out of the WELD Writer’s Club

Enter the Rat Race

Technology has revolutionized the way we communicate. At this very moment, anyone—amateur, professional, or in between—is able to share their platform instantly. As a result, it seems like every Tom, Dick, and Harry has become a writer, photographer, or documentarian.

Right now, there are 110 million blogs floating around out there . . . so where does that leave us—the people with an urge and beckoning to craft but with a voice that seems so small?

Will anything we write actually do anything except fill the internet to the brim with limitless information?

What makes writing really worth it?

We write to impart truth

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

A person without ideas is not a writer; they are a puppet for someone else‘s ideas. Don’t feel you need to break the silence with noise.

Only write if you have something to say.

Write to share the truth that God has revealed to humanity, to you. Declare those truths in the most magnificently subtle ways. Expertly insert them into the background of your paintings. Integrate them in language and form. Allow your audience to mine for them, to experience the delight of discovery rather than the spectatorship of a show.

Write so truth—the beautiful, hidden things of this world—can be known.

We write to impact change.

I asked my writer friend Kelsi why she writes. Her response was profound:

“For me, writing is taking an idea and making it tangible—taking apart something complicated and putting it into simple terms. Writing, by nature, is teaching.”

The truth you have to say is worth saying because it can produce movement—whether it is the movement of the mind, soul, or hands and feet—and movement changes things.

Write about things that matter. Write about birds and trees and mountains. Ordinary life. Quantum mechanics, if you’re so inclined.

Write about heartache and suffering. Write about what surprises you. Write about the ugly, the forgotten, and the invisible. Write about hope.

My faith leads me to believe that our longing to connect to the world through words has to do with something more significant than we often think. It originates at the beginning, in Genesis, when the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.

In a series of whispers, God chose to lift the world out of the formless void at the command of His words.

Have you ever thought about that before?

He could have clapped His hands, thought a single thought, or swirled His breath into what our world is today. But instead, He spoke the planets, the fruit trees, and the tree frogs into existence.

With the words “let there be“ our story began. Words were His chosen tools of creation. Everything we see is His spoken world.

When we write, we are reflecting —if only with a flickering moment—those first profound moments of recorded time, where God created through the magic of words.

We write to preserve the human experience

“To write is to taste life twice.” —Anais Ninn

Words are vessels that carry our legacy to the world. They freeze time and store it in a capsule for us , leaving living memorials for posterity to rediscover. They record the ebb and flow of our lives. They help us number our days.

When you sit down to write, you are preserving a portion of your life—a thought, an idea, a reflection, an image, a story, an experience—forever.

I don‘t think it‘s a coincidence that God left behind His recorded words for us to treasure and meditate on. This was His chosen method for man to know Him. Through the enduring power of words—His words—the mysteries of life and death have been made known to us. Now our words may not be supernatural, but they are ambassadors of meaning and the curators of story.

Words remain; let us learn to use them well.

We write for the love of the craft

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest Hemingway

Words are vessels that carry our legacy to the world. They freeze time and store it in a capsule for us , leaving living memorials for posterity to rediscover. They record the ebb and flow of our lives. They help us number our days.

When you sit down to write, you are preserving a portion of your life—a thought, an idea, a reflection, an image, a story, an experience—forever.

I don‘t think it‘s a coincidence that God left behind His recorded words for us to treasure and meditate on. This was His chosen method for man to know Him. Through the enduring power of words—His words—the mysteries of life and death have been made known to us. Now our words may not be supernatural, but they are ambassadors of meaning and the curators of story.

Words remain; let us learn to use them well.

We Write to Live Our Questions

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

― Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Writing is a way to live our questions meaningfully.

We write in order to know what we think . . . to construct the conceptual scaffoldings that allow us to build our ideas from still, small, inklings.

You don’t always have to be certain to write, just like you don’t always need to be certain to have faith. Struggle is necessary for both to grow. The objective of your writing (and your faith) is far more important than your steadiness in getting there.

It is possible to understand without knowing.

Far too often, we forget what writing means—as an art form, as a vehicle of sharing the human experience, as a process of translating metaphors as well as creating them. The implications of this volatile craft on our lives are monumental, but our tendency is to reduce it to a means for self-promotion and immediate gratification.

We look at likes and click-throughs, comments, and analytics to base our self-worth upon. We look at others response to our art as a statement of value. In short, we leave the execution of our calling up to popular opinion instead of resting on what we’ve been summoned to do with our gifts and abilities. Fortunately, God judges success very differently than we do.

Success to Him is simply a matter of good stewardship. Look at what’s in your hands. Are you using it?

Once we return to the bare bones of what makes writing so important, we can finally begin to work. The fear and frustration can give way to purpose.

Examine what your writing is tethered to. Why are you compelled to create in the first place? Finding this anchor will steady you through discouragement, keeping you centered on the real work at hand—the delightful (and important) task of putting forth words about the world in which we live.