The Eternal Quest

Contentment is such a key to making it through life. In fact godliness with contentment is great gain, Paul said. Great gain is out there just waiting to be scooped up by those who hold these attributes. The godliness portion I will leave out at this point, mostly because that is for us to figure out as individuals as we follow after God. The contentment portion though, is a hot topic for me right now. Right now as things are falling apart around me. Temporal things will always fall apart eventually,(yes, even iMacs ;) ), this is the only promise they hold. It does not matter what the ad campaign says, what the dude with all the best gear says and especially not what your esthetician says, it will all fall apart.
The thing of it is that we all have this stuff to varying degrees and it is all decaying at various degrees. So what will happen if our contentment is hinged upon these things? The obvious post-Christmas answer is that we will bloat up with despair and die miserable. The degree to which we can financially afford to hold off this inevitable decree is the degree to which we will remain blinded and to some extent the lifespan this cycle will live in within us. Basically the more money you or I have the more toys we can buy to keep the 'thing' from dying. The underlying question here is 'What is the "thing" and what will keep it alive?'
The thing is the immortal which dwells within. It is the part of our makeup which is eternal. I could say soul or spirit, but those words are so over used that a lot of their meaning has been wrung out over a myriad religious arguments. I prefer to call it the eternal component of our being because this helps me to keep in mind the shelf life of this thing. This also helps to make it clear why temporal things will never fill this thing and help it achieve the contentment it desires. I feed my organic person with (mostly) organic food because those systems integrate. If I feed my organic person inorganic food (or McDonald's) I will die because the two systems are not integrated. Square peg round hole, right? So the eternal part of me must need something eternal to feed on to satisfy it. It must find a system which will integrate with its own. I may attempt to feed it with relationships with other beings containing an eternal component, but this will be largely doomed to failure. Not to say that there is not a contentment and feeding which is derived from relationships, but to feed solely from a diminishing source is futile as an end in itself.
So then I am left with one alternative. I must find a self sustaining eternal source from which to derive the nourishment I need to have this peculiar contentment which does not need stuff. This source then can only be God. He alone is the self-sustaining, eternal fountain of life. It is He alone who can fill the insatiable hunger of my spirit. Insatiable because it only follows that if a body has an appetite roughly proportional to its size (except at Christmas) then an eternal body must have a very large appetite indeed.
So let us belly up to the Lord and partake freely of the life that only He can give and thereby sustain the only life we will keep.