Sometimes I want to skip forward in life. I long for the days of the dreams that I hold in my heart. And while the dreams aren’t wrong, the wanting is. I believe that we all have deep desires in our hearts and in our minds. This last weekend affirmed it for me as well.
I had the wonderful opportunity to go to women’s retreat with a bunch of college ladies. We girls, but we also got to business with tackling the big stuff. I went to a seminar on contentment. It was technically on contentment in singleness, but the message is still the same. We have a time that is now and a purpose for now.
We talked about the story of Rachel. If you don’t know it, Rachel was never really happy with her life. She longed for children, and that became her goal and what her life revolved around. It was her focus and her selfish desire. She even threatened that she would kill herself if she did not have a child of her own. In the end this desire was the thing that ended her life as she died in childbirth with her second son. It is so striking to me that this is a woman who was sought after not for her ability to have children but purely because at first sight her future husband delighted in her. She wanted children so badly that she went at great lengths to secure them by her own means. Not by God’s, but her own. She had a son first; a great honor and she named him Joseph which means “another one.” She wasn’t satisfied. She had a son, which was highly revered and after giving birth all she could do was say I want another. And she got her plea, with yet another son. Her son Benjamin’s name means “my sorrow.” That meaning drips with bitterness when I hear it.
I don’t want to be a Rachel. I want to be content. I want to fill my role in my life in the present. I have been placed here for a reason, right now. What greater thing can I do but take advantage of it?
I had the wonderful opportunity to go to women’s retreat with a bunch of college ladies. We girls, but we also got to business with tackling the big stuff. I went to a seminar on contentment. It was technically on contentment in singleness, but the message is still the same. We have a time that is now and a purpose for now.
We talked about the story of Rachel. If you don’t know it, Rachel was never really happy with her life. She longed for children, and that became her goal and what her life revolved around. It was her focus and her selfish desire. She even threatened that she would kill herself if she did not have a child of her own. In the end this desire was the thing that ended her life as she died in childbirth with her second son. It is so striking to me that this is a woman who was sought after not for her ability to have children but purely because at first sight her future husband delighted in her. She wanted children so badly that she went at great lengths to secure them by her own means. Not by God’s, but her own. She had a son first; a great honor and she named him Joseph which means “another one.” She wasn’t satisfied. She had a son, which was highly revered and after giving birth all she could do was say I want another. And she got her plea, with yet another son. Her son Benjamin’s name means “my sorrow.” That meaning drips with bitterness when I hear it.
I don’t want to be a Rachel. I want to be content. I want to fill my role in my life in the present. I have been placed here for a reason, right now. What greater thing can I do but take advantage of it?
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