Contentment. Or the lack thereof.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

     Lately it seems as if I have been struggling with contentment. I guess I have battled this before, but never to this magnitude and length. When I was younger I could not wait to get out of high school, which eventually turned into college. I would say that is normal and even though I felt that way I really didn't have a choice in the situation. I just accepted my life at the time. I'm not saying those times were bad, I just felt held back by these requirements and wanted to get on with my life. 

     Now I am married and live in Asheville with Aaron. We both have jobs and other responsibilities which keep us busy. We have a decent size apartment and are able to pay our bills and have some left over. We have been completely blessed with our situation now, but for some reason I feel there is a lot left to be desired. 

Asheville is a pretty small big city. There is only so much to do in the winter, and even though I have enjoyed all the snow we have been getting, it always seems to come on a weekend when we are free to explore and get out of our house. On weeknights we pretty much stay home and try to catch some of the TV shows we watch. Not too exciting, I know! But that also happens to be an effort to save money. Having all this time at home would be fine if I were happy with where we are living. I have been active over the past month to start investing in making it feel like our place. Our bedroom actually feels the most comfortable as we have hung curtains, changed our duvet and I got this really awesome wool rug that makes it look so chic. (If you can make an all white apartment look chic.) The other rooms seem to be a mix-match of a bunch of styles. 

I think part of what fueled this discontentment is our initial house search. I am completely happy with our price range, just not happy with from what we have to choose. I did a little research to see what we could get in Nashville (just to see how much a difference there really was) and I was shocked at what we could get in Nashville versus what we could get here. You would expect it to be the opposite. That was really disheartening. Plus, we just weren't finding anything we felt was right for us. We wanted to be able to take advantage of the first time home buyers tax credit, but that won't happen now. It is so very important to us to have a home where others can stay with us, where we have enough room to have people over, and where we have enough room for a growing family. We truly believe where we live is God's house and we want to use it to glorify Him. We want to have our doors "open" and always be ready for anything that comes our way.

I feel as if this discontentment won't go away until I feel settled here. To me being settled looks like having a house, not living in an apartment. It seems like I haven't been settled for some time, having lived in two apartments in LA in two years that I had to move out of after only ten months. My living situation in Asheville feels temporary and that makes staying in Asheville feel even more temporary. I want this place to start feeling like home instead of somewhere I am going to be for only a little while. 

My discontentment is not only from our living situation. I have a creative side that has not been met in quite a while. As I mentioned in my previous post, we have an extra room we are trying to convert to an office space. This takes time as we don't have some key furniture pieces just yet to make it function. I know when we get this space to the way we want it I will have more of a drive to work on my art. 

I hope this does not sound like I am complaining. Well, maybe I am just a little bit, but I know that I should, and need to be, content with what God has given me. He has blessed us more than we could imagine. I am working on finding peace and happiness in this situation and time of discontentment. I know the Lord will help me through this and that He knows my desires even more than I do. 

So, is there anything about which you have been feeling discontent? What do you do to cope with feeling this way? I look forward to hearing from you