christian living on Dissatisfaction

In The Phantom Tollbooth , there is a special kind of food called “subtraction stew.” Produced by a mathemagician, this stew makes you hungrier after you’ve eaten it. Our three main characters don’t ...

Gracious God, we confess that we are often dissatisfied with our lives. We recognize the gap that exists between what we are and what we want to be. Lord, like the woman at the well, we know our failu...

We would worry less if we praised more. Thanksgiving is the enemy of discontent and dissatisfaction.

Lord–some of us are running or dancing into the celebration to come; others of us are tired, limping or stumbling into it. Either way–You are standing there in Your love, with arms open wide, to recei...

The season of Epiphany is an invitation to follow Jesus into the ways of gratitude and joy,. We are no longer bound by the dissatisfaction of our consumer culture that tells us to keep striving for mo...

In this tragic world, we are surrounded by discontented people. Every minute of the day, it is possible to see evidence of this restless discontentment in the way people respond to circumstances. Peop...

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote about this in a 2003 book called The Progress Paradox. Easterbrook’s subtitle was How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. He describes how affluent we have become—​​​bett...

Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After ref...

Whoever is not satisfied with Christ alone, strives after something beyond absolute perfection.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.

You say, 'If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.' You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.

Aren't you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: "May this book, idea, cou...

Learning to be satisfied with what we have rather than desiring more, more, more— this is the essence of joy.

Joy’s trick is to supply Dry lips with what can cool and slake, Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache Nothing can satisfy.

It does not spoil your happiness to confess your sin. The unhappiness is in not making the confession.

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.

Judgment and joy don’t go well together – no, judgment leads to grumbling. I’m sure you’ve met people in your life who are hard to please – maybe even your parents, or your boss. People for whom n...

Contentment is when we tell the Shepherd that His provision is enough for all our physical and material needs. If our old car gimps down the road, that is fine. If we get a shiny newer auto with less ...

There are two ways each of us can approach life: spending our days meeting our needs or looking for ways to meet others' needs. The mystery is that when we spend our life focused on our own needs,...

All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room.

No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disa...

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever bea...

There are two ways to get enough: One is to accumulate more and more, the other is to desire less.

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore…. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent.

Some kind of loss is usually necessary to turn the mind toward faith. If you’re satisfied with want you’ve got, you’re hardly going to look for anything better.

When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us rather than that we had been made for Him.

Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.