the frame of my soul.

I promise that soon I will really blog again, with pictures and captions and videos...but for now I am focusing on settling my family into our new home. Kitchen, master, and kids's rooms are unpacked. Our walls are lovely shades of grey, yellow, and teal...only hallways and bathrooms left to go! Amidst all the chaos, I have continued to enjoy words from Jeremiah Burroughs:

"Spiritual contentment comes from the frame of the soul. The contentment of a man or woman who is rightly content does not come so much from outward arguments or from any outward help, as from the disposition of their own hearts. The disposition of their own hearts causes and brings forth this gracious contentment rather than any external thing.
Let me explain myself. Someone is disturbed, suppose it to be a child or a man or a woman. If you come and bring some great thing to please them, perhaps it will quiet them and they will be contented. It is the thing you bring that quiets them, not the disposition of their own spirits, not any good temper in their own hearts, but the external thing you bring them. But when a Christian is content in the right way, the quiet comes more from the temper and disposition of his own heart than from any external argument or from the possession of anything in the world."

How often am I like the child who is discontent in spirit, longing for some external present from God, only to be temporarily appeased when the gift finally comes! I have the tendency to always look ahead to the next thing, thinking THEN everything will be perfect: when I am done working, when we have a better income, when we move into a house, when we develop friendships in a new place...the list never ends.

Lord, make my heart content in Christ rather than in the good gifts you give me. May the frame of my soul be truly content, resting in the  gospel of grace.