Learning to Re-Learn

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I am examining four things you and I need to learn—and re-learn and re-learn! For example, how often do we need to learn to be content. Someone once said, “The thing about life is, it’s just so daily.” Do you find it that way sometimes: Routine, mundane, repetitive, and seemingly meaningless? Learning to live with the dailyness of life is a key to contentment and joy.

At times, we are victims of looking on the other side of our fence and deciding the grass over there sure looks greener than our grass. It just sometimes seems like our lives are painted drab gray and everybody else has bright red or yellow!

All our lives are made up in large part of those daily duties, those mundane tasks, those repetitive responsibilities. Nobody escapes them. Regardless of how green the grass looks in someone else’s garden, believe me when I tell you their lives are very daily, too.

Someone once wrote: “The uncommon life is the product of the day lived in the uncommon way.” That means a person whose life is exciting and full is one who finds meaning and satisfaction in the seemingly insignificant, daily things in our lives.

Let me give you a very simple example: I have some china I really love. And it’s gives me great pleasure to set my table with it, to hold it, even to wash it. I enjoy my china. I remember once, when my daughter was very young, she found it rather strange to hear me getting excited about this china that I had owned for years.

And I said to her, “If you can find pleasure and joy in the little things in your life, your life will be full of pleasure and joy. Otherwise, it’s going to be very drab most of the time, with a few high points only now and then.”

Regardless of how humble and unpretentious your daily life may seem, you can elevate it if you can learn to enjoy and appreciate the “dailyness” of your life—if you can appreciate what you have. As the Apostle Paul tells us in Philippians 4, it is learning the secret of being content in any and every situation. Contentment brings meaning to our daily lives and frees us from the dreariness of looking over our fence at someone else’s grass.

Have you enrolled in the school of contentment? You can begin today by appreciating the small things, smelling the roses in your life, instead of being focused on what you don’t have and looking over your fence all the time.