Satisfaction

by

I’m An Unsatisfied Shopper

I’m not the most knowledgeable grocery shopper, but I know there is a conspiracy in the food industry.

Yesterday my wife, Lily, and I dropped in on our son who is living about 300 km’s away from us. The plan was to spend the night, have breakfast together in the morning and then be off.

When we got there I was a little hungry and Mike, at one point, said he was feeling a little hungry as well.

Looking through the cupboards, we observed a typical twenty-something male’s kitchen.

It reminded me of Old Mother Hubbard’s kitchen – she didn’t have anything in her cupboards either.

Mike had an early appointment so he needed to get to bed. I needed to stretch my legs after a disappointing finish to the Leafs’ game so I said to Lily, “Let’s go shopping”.

We didn’t have much time but we hit Walmart because it was open late.

I don’t normally go on grocery shopping trips with Lily because I put things in the cart that she would not buy on her own. They’re usually things that aren’t good for me.

But there I was with an assignment to find hot dogs and hot dog buns.

It wasn’t too hard; I quickly found the large hot dogs that came five in a pack. Mike just has to feed himself so that was a good number to get.

Then I went searching for buns. I found them in another part of the store.

They don’t have the hot dogs and the hot dog buns close together, and I know why – it’s so you don’t see the discrepancy when you buy the buns!

The grocery people are hoping that, by the time you find the buns, you will have forgotten how many hot dogs came in the package.

But being the keen sharp-minded shopper that I am, I noticed right away.

I had just tossed a package of 5 hot dogs into the cart and now I was holding in my hand a package of 8 hot dog buns.

At this point we should take a poll: Does anyone else think that these are weird numbers? Why 5 hot dogs, and why in the world 8 buns?

I’m not sure why they do that. You need the same number of dogs as buns!

I did the math – you and I would need to buy 8 packs of dogs and 5 packages of buns to have a bun for every hot dog.

That’s 40, by the way, and if you were feeding a football team I can see you buying that many. But for a family or for a single guy? Who would do that? – no one!

And who would leave you with extra buns so that you need go out and buy more hot dogs … only to need more buns to finish them off?

It’s a conspiracy.

Here’s the thing: We are driven to get more – more things, more experiences, more money, more … you name it! There is always something more we want. This desire for more is never satisfied, and it takes away from being at peace with yourself and with God. He wants you to be satisfied with where you are and what you have, and from that place of satisfaction He will add the more.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What is keeping you from being satisfied? Leave you comments below.

by

What Will Bring Satisfaction To Your Day?

At the end of a day we want to look back with a sense of satisfaction. No matter what kind of day it was – a busy day, a day of trouble, or a day of ease – we want to feel satisfied with our day.

How-Satisfied-Are-You-With-Your-Life

My Saturday could have blown up in my face … it certainly didn’t go down as one of the most memorable days of my life. But at the end of it, satisfaction is what I felt.

It started as a great day; I had nothing pressing, could do anything I decided to do. There were a couple of things that were in the back of my mind that I wanted to do, like go for a bike ride.

It was a warm, sunny fall day with the leaves turning – everything outside was inviting. Instead, I ended up sitting on my couch in the basement with my computer … all day long.

With all the free time I had on Saturday, I thought I would upgrade our website to the latest version of software. As I started the task, I knew it was not going to be easy to do. But I did have the time, so I thought I’d go for it.

… And boy, did I! Along the way, I learned lots – more than I had ever wanted to know about software and the internet. I may be scarred for life now.

There were a couple of times during the day that I crashed our website and was not sure if I could get it back. I feared I would have to rebuild the website from scratch.

I read all kinds of horror stories about upgrading websites that really should have convinced me that I should have just left it alone, but no I kept going.

It may have been my dad’s voice in my head saying, “Finish what you start”. I wanted to go for a bike ride but I had to finish the upgrade. This compulsion goes back to when I was a kid and colouring in a colouring book …

One time I started colouring a picture and then half way through got bored and turned the page to start a new one. My dad said to me “Finish the one you started.” Those words got stuck in the part of my brain that makes decisions and now I have to finish what I start.

All day I kept asking questions via google search, and I had to reframe those questions over and over to get the answers I was looking for. I had to comb through useless information to get the nuggets of helpful suggestions.

I had to take some risks, because instructions were not that clear. I failed several times before I was successful. And it was the littlest things that brought the results I wanted. After hours of frustration, I found someone who had a similar problem, and the solution was to put an “@” at the beginning of line 1411 in some file.

It worked … it was 9:30 pm.

Even though it was a gorgeous day, and I could have gone biking, could have done a million things – even cutting the grass looked more exciting that day! – still, satisfaction marked my day.

Here’s the thing: There are a lot of difficult things we would rather put off, not deal with, turn a blind eye to. But if you will keep seeking God about these difficult issues or personal growth areas, not ignoring them, but persevering by continually bringing them to God, when God brings that answer, in the end, you will have as much satisfaction as when you do something enjoyable.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What have you stuck with in order to see it finished?  Leave your comment below.