From The Pastor’s Pen – By Brian Horrobin
Someone once said, “There are two ways to be rich. One is to have all you want. The other is to be satisfied with what you have.”
With Christmas Day almost here, now is an opportune time to consider our current state of wealth.
Did you have a bed to sleep in last night?
Was there food in your refrigerator when you got up today?
Do you have clothes to wear and a coat to keep you warm when you go outside?
I am betting that most of us would answer ‘yes’ to all of these questions.
However, our pessimistic mindset may cause us to gravitate towards the things we don’t have rather than those things we do have.
Consider what we do at all-you-can-eat dinner buffets (remember those?).
We pay a set price and then proceed to go and get our money’s worth by eating ALL we want.
The end result is more often than not a miserable stomach-ache and a date with Alka Seltzer.
This cuts against the grain of our reasoning, though, because we think we are missing out on something that we are entitled to getting if we don’t eat to the max.
I once attended one of those elaborate Chinese buffets with a friend of mine who was on a carbohydrate-reduced diet.
While I gorged, and later suffered, he ate sparingly and seemed to savour every bite.
The ride home was an endurance test for me, yet my friend couldn’t stop reminiscing about the various items he had enjoyed at our meal.
Simply put, he had been content with what he could have, instead of focusing on what he couldn’t have.
That just makes good sense, doesn’t it?
So, don’t move through this season treating Christmas like a Chinese buffet and suffer the spiritual indigestion of the “gimme’s”.
Enjoy what you have and thank God for it.
