The Middle Of Things
Lucy Holt
I’ve really enjoyed re-reading Philippians in our Sunday services recently. I first remember studying Philippians at Spring Harvest as a teenager, in a completely different season of my life. Paul’s words written from prison two thousand years ago were relevant then to a teenager in the mid-nineties, and are still challenging to me now as an adult and parent.
‘I have leaned to be content whatever the circumstance.’
Philippians 4:11
Paul’s words about finding contentment, a positive perspective & purpose, through following Jesus, feel fresh now as we wrestle with busy lives & competing demands on our time and energy. It can feel hard to find contentment when world events feel huge and worrying, and social media makes other people’s lives seem sparkling and full of success.
Paul wrote these words right in the messy middle of his story. Although the Bible is now written in neat chapters, his original letter was written when he didn’t know how his prison sentence would end, or how the church would grow in the future.
Life rarely splits itself neatly into chapters, so pausing doesn’t come naturally and moments of contentment can be easy to miss.
One of my favourite type of TV program is a (not too gruesome or scary) murder mystery. When Nik asked us to picture what contentment looks like in the talk recently, I thought of the end of an episode of ‘Death in Paradise’, where the crime is solved and all the characters sit in the sunshine, relaxing together because everything is done.
Really though, life doesn’t feel like that and moments where things are finished and resolved are rare. The challenge is to recognise and practise gratitude for some parts of life, while other things are still complicated and we don’t know how the story will unfold.
Since then I’ve been trying to reflect on what it means to be content while still in the middle of things, since we are right in the middle of decorating our house there are plenty of opportunities to do this!
Walking in the hills above Ullswater this week during half term was a great opportunity to do this. Even as we were climbing a big hill and working hard, the view was beautiful. This really inspired me to reflect on the other, less visible, parts of life where we can learn to appreciate the beauty of the view - even when we are still working hard to climb a challenging hill.
