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While more money and more freedom can provide you with more pleasure, they cannot provide you with more contentment.
Contentment is a condition of the soul, and it does not come with getting what you want, but in giving thanks to God for what you have been given.
Any man who believes he cannot be content unless he has more time or freedom has made an idol of these things, for he believes that earthly things can grant spiritual virtue.
There is a “time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot . . . a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” The wise man learns how to grow where he is planted. He chooses joy. He embraces the time and season, these people and this place.
the longing for home is a constant
Our hearts are restless, waiting for the restoration of home.
C. S. Lewis believed that our pain and discomfort in this world point to the fact that something is amiss—that there must be more to come.
And our aching for a better home suggests that we were built to find shalom, even if we can’t quite reach it yet.5
That nagging feeling that we don’t quite fit in here is much of the reason why people spend so much time decorating their homes, “nesting,” and watching shows on HGTV.
Nothing here on earth will be fully satisfying. But to the degree that we’re going to find anything that satisfies on this side of the afterlife, it’s going to be in the relationships with the people with whom we share work, experiences, suffering, and love.
Sometimes change is good, and sometimes change is necessary. But the changes we pursue should be oriented toward the goal of finding a place to stay and to serve.
When his disciples asked for help in learning how to pray, Jesus’s response was disarmingly simple. We’re to focus on wanting what God wants—may His Name be hallowed, not mine; His Will be advanced, not mine—and when it comes to asking for anything for ourselves, we should ask for . . . bread, for today. Not stable housing a year out, not steady employment into the next decade. Just a loaf of bread. And just for today.
Ask simply to live more faithfully in the here and now.
investing in a future that isn’t guaranteed.
we can love our neighbor, today, even if we don’t know what the whole future holds.
For now, we’re making a bet, investing where we are, and working harder at living in the moment.
the people around you are annoying, but the people in the next, “better” place are annoying, too. People everywhere are annoying. Community is hard.
Commit anyway, and act as if your body is going to end up in the place where you are. Ev...
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the typical American stayed in one house for . . . four years.
More Americans live alone today than at any time in our history, by big margins.
mid-1960s, just 17 percent of 21- to 36-year-olds had never been married; today, it’s nearly three-fifths.
we didn’t know what we didn’t know. As
It turned out that having no connections there to rely on (in particular, older friends who could guide and mentor us) made for thin lives—
Many of our young adults feel a hard-to-define, existential ache in their chests: What is my calling? Where is my place? Who are my people? I’m surrounded by humans, but I don’t really know any of them. Everything feels alien. How did this happen?
The six of us committed to assembling for a few days each year to laugh, to eat and drink, to update each other on our lives, and most important, to hold each other accountable to certain goals in life.
What if those people we dislike so much are more like us than we care to admit?
what if there’s a higher-order bond that connects us that’s prior to and more important than the lower-order schisms that divide us?
I’m not advocating for a “mushy middle” on policy, as if just singing “Kumbaya” and “splitting the difference” between conservative and progressive policy proposals would somehow work. I don’t think it will. But debating policy and demonizing your debate partner are fundamentally different things.
We should stop lazily absolving bad actors on our side by just shrugging and saying, “Well, they all lie.” Be
Accountability starts at home, and “what-about-ism” is an intellectually vacuous way to live a life—not to mention being a morally bankrupt way to raise our kids.
We need to recover the essential distinction between journalism and entertainment. Why? Because a democracy depends on shared facts. Real journalism isn’t a “game”; it’s not about the quippiest hot takes. Journalists do not exist to entertain you, confirm your opinions, or support your candidate. In a democracy, we count on journalists to ask hard questions.
So when we hear anyone powerful, in response to questions about their behavior, attack the media in general—as opposed to merely pushing back on a biased question—we should look more critically at them and their behavior.
the people who want more anger have missed something important. They’ve come to see the political world through the lens of anti-tri...
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They’ve become so focused on what separates us that they’ve lost sight of the higher-or...
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Our identity cannot be found in anti-tribes. It cannot be found in politics. And it cannot be found flitting about, here, there, everywhere . . . nowhere. We find lives of meaning and purpose at and near home.
Imagine if just 10 percent of the time we spend angrily tracking national political news were redirected to volunteering at our kids’ or grandkids’ school, serving at a soup kitchen, visiting a nursing home. We’d be community-rich.
The American response to speech we don’t agree with is not less speech but more speech. We try to persuade each other, not silence each other.
the response to so much of the ugliness of our moment is not to retreat to our own corners; the prescription is not less engagement, but more.
Turn off the television. Log out of Twitter or Facebook. Put your smartphone in a drawer. Go outside and throw a ball with your son or daughter. Read a book together. Bake cookies and take them to the new family that just moved in across the street. Invite that coworker you’ve been meaning to get to know out for lunch. Help clean up after coffee hour at church. Sign up for a shift at the animal shelter. Mow your neighbor’s lawn, on the sly, undetected. Visit a widow.
We don’t have problems because we belong to too many different groups but rather because we prioritize them wrongly. When we get the order wrong, we cause connections to fray.
Having our “identifiers in the right order” doesn’t mean we pretend to agree about topics on which we are actually divided.
Glossing over our deep divides might be superficially appealing, but we must resist the urge to water down the debates in the interest of some halfhearted truce.
Many of the issues we face today are too important to approach timidly or dishonestly. They are worth arguing over—passionately. The answer is not for everyone to start waving white flags, for faux unity is no unity at all.
As Americans, we need to agree first on the universal dignity of all people, before we descend to the more divisive but less important debates about the prudential use of the levers of government power.
We are relational beings, and we’re meant for community. We’re meant to be rooted, not rootless. We’re meant to be together, pursuing goals and dreams in common.
Because, ultimately, it’s not legislation we’re lacking; it’s the tight bonds that give our lives meaning, happiness, and hope. It’s the habits of heart and mind that make us neighbors and friends.
