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| Billie Silvey |
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| Bounty |
| November 2006 |
| --“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”--Robert Louis Stevenson I am currently reading a series of detective novels by Alexander McCall Smith. His detective, Precious Ramotswe, founder of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, was called “The Miss Marple of Botswana” in the New York Times Review of Books. Though set in Africa at the edge of the vast Kalahari Desert, small details keep reminding me of my childhood home in the Texas Panhandle in contrast with life today. It was best expressed by Mma Ramotswe’s American client in Tears of the Giraffe when she said, “We had found a country where the people treated one another well, with respect, and where there were values other than the grab, grab which prevails back home. . . . Everything about my own country seemed so shoddy and superficial when held up against what I saw in Africa. People suffered there, and many of them had very little, but they had this wonderful feeling for others.” Insufficiency What is it about our Los Angeles culture that makes it impossible for people to feel satisfied? Is it that the very air is saturated with advertising? We drive to work in the morning, surrounded by signs and billboards trying to get us to want something we don’t have. We turn on the radio or TV and are met by a barrage of words telling us that we need this or that to be happy or healthy or wealthy. We flip through a magazine and there it is again. Or is it something inside us, some competitive spirit that prompts us to look around at others, meanly comparing what we have with what they do? Of course, there always will be someone with more, so we can never rest content. In the richest country in the world, at a time when all of us see ourselves as middle class, we are encouraged to feel like the orphaned Oliver Twist, holding up our empty porridge bowls and saying, “Please, sir, I want some more.” Enough, Already The Bible, on the other hand, urges us to be content. In fact, it commands it. How many people, asked to name a command of God, would come up with that one? But when the soldiers asked John the Baptist what they should do, he said, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely--be content with your pay” (Luke 3:14). Paul used himself as an example: “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Philippians 4:11). He told Timothy, “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that” (1 Timothy 6:6-7). And the writer to the Hebrews says, “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” Only when we realize that we don’t need more, that we have enough, can we truly be grateful. |