My Aspirational Word of the Year

And a honey of a story

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

Yes, I know it’s nineteen days into 2024 and I’m just now picking my word. What can I say, it’s been busy.

SO busy that I’ve just realized I am already failing on the War and Peace Read a Chapter a Day challenge that I signed up for in December. I’ve read ten chapters, I’m already over week behind. Drat. Well, in my defense, that first over the top party is sort of boring. Too many characters, and lots of tension. Eh, I’ll catch up on Sunday.

ANYWAY, I’ve been turning over words in my head after my end of year Zooms with life coach Jessica Colp and friends. We filled out over 24 pages of questions over a week, covering what we were leaving behind in 2023 and what we wanted to create in the new year.

My overarching theme for this year - calm, contented, growing. After some thought between the three, contented or content is my word. According to Sharla Fritz, there are tons of ways to work with my word.

But a few years ago, I decided to do things differently and be more proactive in using and studying my chosen word. That year I chose the word abide, but besides simply choosing that word, I purposely set out to know what abide meant. I meditated on the word and asked God to teach me and change me. I searched through Scripture and delved into Greek and English meanings.

Huh. Interesting take. I like to follow paths of synchronicity, so I plugged ‘content’ into a biblical search engine and ended up with a plethora of verses, along with a lot of contentious women in Proverbs. And synchronicity, serendipity, whatever you wanted to call it, I found my place, my verse, my chapter to reflect upon this year. Isn’t it beautiful?

Psalm 131

1 My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.

2 But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.

3 Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore.

Weaned? That’s a new one for me, so I set out on my first search for meaning. It was a doozy. I’ll put the link here - Ray Fowler goes into the entire Psalm in depth, if you’re interested - but here’s what he had to say about weaning.

What is a child like during the weaning process? Well, they are agitated, and they are noisy! They are the exact opposite of the still and quiet soul we have just been talking about. But David in this psalm has come through the process. Yes, there was a time when he was more like a screaming baby. But now he is like a weaned child. He finally realizes that he doesn’t need what he thought he needed before.

This picture of the weaned child in verse two is a picture of perfect peace and contentment. What used to provoke fussing and crying and desperation, now no longer affects you. When you let go of your pride, and your comparing, and your trying to run your own life, you too can be quiet and still. You don’t need those things anymore, because you are learning to be content in Christ. The weaned child has reached a new stage of maturity. And if we are to grow and mature as Christians, we must still and quiet our own souls.

Weaning is a child’s first experience of loss. It is a difficult but important lesson that you can’t always get what you want in life, and that you can’t always have your own way. Unfortunately some of us are still trying to learn that lesson. You’d think we would have learned it back when we were weaned! But weaning is a process. It’s a battle to wean a child, and it’s a battle for God to bring us to this place of quiet contentment and rest.

This paragraph from Artur Weiser’s commentary on the Psalms ties it all up neatly with a bow.

“His soul rests on God’s heart and finds its happiness in intimate communion with him, not like an infant crying loudly for his mother’s breast, but like a weaned child that quietly rests by his mother’s side, happy in being with her. Here his heart has found rest; he knows himself to be safe with God and to be sheltered in the love of his heavenly Father. No desire now comes between him and his God; for he is sure that God knows what he needs before he asks him. And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshiper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes. His life’s center of gravity has shifted. He now rests no longer in himself but in God.”

We don’t have children, but we do have nieces and nephews. I still vividly remember reading a fairy tale to my oldest niece on one of my trips home from my job in Germany. She was probably three or four. As I read to her, she NESTLED into me, putting her hand on my leg and leaning her head on my chest so she could see the pictures. My heart melted. Guileless, she trusted me and felt safe in our space.

I love this painting by Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970). It’s untitled, but does it really need one? The child loves the mother, contented, at rest, at peace with no thought or worry for the future. And how perfect is that kiss? When children know that kisses mean affection, they shower them on everyone for a while. I think the mother’s eyes are open so she can keep knitting, the little girl must want to kiss her over and over again.

Another definition of ‘content’ - a feeling of being pleased and satisfied : the state of being content. I equate this type of contentment with the way I feel after a nap or comfort food. One of my favorite comfort foods is toast with butter and honey. What could be better with a cup of tea or a glass of milk? Honey soothes me like nothing else on earth. I drizzle it on my homemade porridge bread on rainy, cold days. Then take a nap. I guess that would be the definition of double content.

Yesterday, I drove home from visiting my parents in North Georgia, and stopped at one of my favorite roadside businesses, Blue Ridge Honey. I’d decided we needed honey in a GLASS jar rather than the small plastic containers. (Really, media outlets, just go ahead and tell me that EVERYTHING I eat and drink will kill me rather than nickel and diming me with stories about plastics, aluminum foil, sugar, preservatives, blah, blah, blah.)

The quart size jar was $25. Okay, I’ll buy it. THEN I spotted a beautiful huge gallon size jug on the bottom shelf. The nice honey lady obligingly checked for me. “It’s $75. AND we just poured it, feel, it’s still warm.” She put my hand on the glass, and sure enough, it WAS a little warm. Almost like the bees had just finished with it. Tickled, I grabbed the heavy thing up and lumbered to the counter.

A man with a beard came around the wooden column and asked if I was going to use it up fairly quickly or store it. Umm, there’s just my husband and me. I mean, I LIKE toast with honey, and I cook with honey, but I’m not a restaurant chef with a lot of turnover at the dinner table.

The honey lady and the cash register lady turned towards him and stopped ringing the purchase. I realized he owned the place. Perfect! “What would you suggest? Should I get the smaller jar, and just keep coming back when it’s empty?” (And yes, I know this artisanal honey place is 3 hours from my house, but they have DELICIOUS raw, natural local honey. Don’t judge.)

He scratched his beard. “Well, you do know that you can FREEZE honey, don’t you? Just get yourself some glass jars, fill them to an inch from the top - our honey is only 13% liquid, so it shouldn’t rise too high, but just in case. . And then just grab one out of the freezer and defrost whenever you finish a jar. It keeps better in the freezer than on the shelf.”

Well, blow me down and butter my biscuits. Or honey them, I’ve got plenty. A helpful culinary tip that now makes the purchase of a gallon instead of a quart totally reasonable! How could my husband complain?

Oh, I know how he can complain - by repeating his favorite shopping phrase that he’s burned into my cortex over the last twenty five years. “So… did we NEED it or did we just WANT it?!?”

Oh, I damn well need this honey. And I’m saving Mr. Thrifty $25 dollars and we’ll have honey for at least the next year. Check it out.

Wow, 5.1 kilos of honey - that’s . . . that’s over eleven pounds!! No wonder I almost put my shoulder out holding that jug steady over all of those mason jars. Yowza.

Just to be on the right side of Mr. Thrifty, I also pulled up Amazon and checked the cost of a glass gallon jug - $17. Geez Louise, I saved the man almost $50! (And you can see why he has to keep me in check. It makes no sense to me that not buying any honey - we still have a large jar from Sam’s - would have saved us $75. Poor man, I really should have told him about my prodigious equivocation skills before we married.)

OHHH, and I just realized that I also saved us quite a bit in shipping costs! Eleven pounds worth. (See what I mean? It’s a gift.)

Bottom line, not up front - After a year of fear, anxiety, and weird depression after my bout with whatever I had last January that wiped out my happy little serotonins, I am most content to calm and quiet myself in 2024.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Nope, it’s a definite goal. Because I’ve just realized I could have been CONTENT with the large jar of honey I have on hand rather than buying a gallon for the freezer. Drat. Well, I have a whole year to work on this contentment gig.

"True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not."
— Seneca