Be like LT (On Contentment…)

Howdy y’all!

I’m gonna try to shorten my blogs….my tendency is to ramble and to be an over-detailed individual and I want to start to develop the art of brevity mixed with clarity 😉

I want to talk briefly about my opinions and ideas on the topic of contentment.

I recently read an article by Huffington Post entitled “How to Raise a Kid That Isn’t Whiny and Annoying.” Since I am recently engaged (I had to drop that in somewhere) to a wonderful girl, and just based on the title itself, I figured I would give it a read. You can to if you just follow this link: http://huff.to/17PplQi 

It was one of those articles that leveled me and caused me to realize how ungrateful of a society we live in. Yet even more so, it caused me to once again have the realization that I am a very impatient and often ungrateful person. It’s not like I need to prove it to you, but I’ll give some examples for the sake of this blog post:

– I get frustrated when my phone is slow.

– I lose it when I can’t grab wifi or 3G.

– Try driving with me at least once because on a bad day…heck, even an average day, I am a road-rage infused, impatient jerk. Thanks for putting up with me, Tanya!

– I think everyone needs to function on my timing.

– I constantly want more…especially when it comes to guitar stuff.

– I whine when I am hungry.

– I can’t stand the girls soccer team currently next to me as they blab about who knows what while I am trying to write my blog.

As if this isn’t bad enough, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to travel to some very impoverished countries and I’ve seen the poverty in my own city…yet, I complain and I am never satisfied.

I would try take it easy on myself, but it’s the truth…and the even greater truth is that there is a God out there who loves me anyway and thinks I am worthy saving, even at the cost of death. Wrap your head around that!

God uses the coolest and sometimes strangest things to speak to my heart, and yours too.

I am a direct support professional who works with the mentally handicapped for an awesome organization called Christian Horizons. This job has been such a blessing in more ways than one. One of the recent ways God was speaking to my heart on the subject of contentment was through one of the men I support whom we shall call LT. LT is dual-diagnosis and confined to a wheelchair. He can speak and crack some good jokes, but other than that, he cannot walk, he cannot eat on his own, and he cannot support himself in any way. He is a man of not too many words (unlike myself), but there is a phrase he utters every once in a while; sometimes it seems to come out of nowhere. He will just simply state:

“I’m so happy.”

Wow. This man has taught me so much. It is such a blessing. I’ve heard people say terrible things about how the mentally handicapped are useless and don’t deserve our help…besides that idea being messed up on more than one level, I strongly disagree. In one simple sentence, God is using LT to teach me the value of being happy with what I have, or to be happy with the mere fact that I am alive and breathing, not to mention that I am typing this on my MacBook Pro that I got after enrolling in a fantastic music school, while wearing a nice T-shirt and pair of shorts, drinking a Tim Hortons coffee and listening to The Civil Wars on my iPhone 4s.

Man, I wish I had an iPhone 5.

TySharron