Cultivating a Contented Heart - Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Life is hard, and life gives us a lot of opportunities to be discontent. But the contented heart says, “I recognize that even in the midst of these painful, difficult circumstances, there is a God who is still good."
Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Wednesday, June 25, 2014.
Nancy continues the series "Cultivating a Contented Heart."
Nancy: We've been talking about this issue of discontentment—murmuring, complaining, whining. Many of us live in this world of "if only." If only I had this, or if only I didn't have this. If only this had happened to me, or if only this had not happened to me.
I believe it was Elisabeth Elliot who defined suffering as having what you don't want and wanting what you don't have, and that could really apply to this whole area of discontent as well.
What are some of the things that we as women are discontented about, that we murmur about? Possessions—not enough or not nice enough possessions, too old or not up-to-date. We can apply that to clothes, to house, to furniture, to appliances. Some of us are hardly finished redecorating one room before we have to move on to the next, just to keep everything always looking updated.
Some of us don't even have room for what we do have, so we've got to build storage sheds, find more closets, or get a house with more closets so that we can store these things that we don't even have use for.
It's easy to complain and whine about our geographic location, about the weather, where we happen to live, about the community that we live in, the size of the town.
Many of us murmur about matters related to our family status, marital status. The women who are single complain that they wish they were married, and I've heard so many married women complain that they wish that they weren't married, or that they were married to a different kind of husband. Speaking of husbands—have you ever found yourself whining about his particular personality, about his temperament?
It's interesting how in so many cases, the very things that drew you to that man were the things that were the opposite of you. You were a very outgoing, talkative person, and what you loved about that young man when you were courting with him was that he was so quiet—until you've been married for six months and he hasn't said six words. Then you found yourself discontented with this husband, with the very qualities that may have drawn you then become a point of murmuring and complaining.
There may be, as it relates to your marriage, the feeling that there's not enough time for you and your husband to be together. There are those seasons of life where, because his work or yours, or the number of children and the transporting back and forth, that you may find yourself whining that you don't have enough time together as a couple. I'm not saying you shouldn't try and do something about that, but these can become issues for discontent. Nancy Leigh DeMoss - June 25, 2014
Check out Nancy's website "Revive Our Hearts" for the entire radio broadcast