Complacent, Discontent - Rediscovering Hope

At times, I get so frustrated with myself. I shout out loud at myself for being so freaking stupid. How can I be so blind? Why didn't I see it coming? How did it creep up on me? A spirit of apathy blurred my vision, lowered my sights and lured me into a place of messed up priorities where mediocrity was acceptable.

You know, God is so good, so gentle, so patient. His grace breaks me and restores me all at the same time. One of things he's showed me in the past weeks is how my future became my present, and somewhere in that process hope got squeezed out. Let me try and explain it how I saw it in my minds eye...

Hold your hands in front of you, thumbs towards you, palms facing each other so they look like two pillars. Imagine they are two metal plates, and picture a bolt running through them from right to left, with the nut on the left hand side. The left plate is your future, the right is your present. Your future is joined to your present by the bolt, and in between - in the gap between your hands - sits hope: hope of a future filled with things yet to be revealed. The bolt links present and future, and the nut ensures that the future never falls away

OK, so far so good. But then, picture this. The nut starts turning clockwise, and gradually the future gets closer to the present. The present stays firmly rooted to the spot, and as the nut turns, future is dragged towards present - what lies ahead is being pulled into what is already here. That's the wrong way around!

As future approaches present the gap between them gets smaller, and as it reduces, hope is squeezed out, bit by bit. Eventually, the plates touch and the future becomes the present. No longer is there something to look forward to - all that there will be is here now.

Do you see what happened there? Life - a journey into an unfolding future - a future that remains forever before us, leading us, inspiring us, luring us deeper into the adventure - became existence - a 'death with breath' filled with mediocrity and devoid of hope.

As I saw that play out in my mind, I realised I had become complacent. Being content is right - contentment is an expression of gratitude for what we have in our lives, but when complacency enters the mix, our focus gets out of whack and we concentrate on what we've got for the sake of what we've got. We begin to place our hope not in tomorrow, but in today. We invest our lives into bricks and mortar, gadgets and boxes and we forget that tomorrow is an adventure yet to be experienced.

As God revealed my complacency to me I realised that all the discomfort of the past few weeks has been him wrestling the complacency's grip from the spanner turning the nut. Each knock, each kick in the nuts, each disappointment has been him making a quarter turn anti-clockwise on that nut, loosening the grip my present has on my future, creating space for hope and re-extending my field of vision.

Be content with all that you have today, but never let your gaze fall away from the adventure of tomorrow, and never let hope get squeezed out. In the hope of tomorrow we can find contentment today, but in complacency we find only mediocrity, and in that we make discontent the constant companion of our soul.