Sometimes it happens while looking at a picture of a place you have never visited. Sometimes it’s a beautiful house, a car with the kind of comfort you appreciate, or someone speaking casually about a holiday that would require months of careful saving for you. You find yourself thinking, ‘I’d like that.’ Then another thought arrives: should I, as a person who speaks so often about stewardship and obedience to God, want those things at all?
I have no interest in pretending that I don’t want a good life. I would like material freedom. I want to build things that succeed, to be competent enough to command fair value for my work, to see places I have only read about, and to enjoy some of the comforts that money can buy. Some of those desires are about responsibility; some are simply about enjoyment. I don’t think I need to manufacture a noble explanation for every good thing I would like to own. I also know how easily a desire can begin to shape a person long before the thing is acquired.
Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 6 refuse to let us settle this with either indulgence or denial. He warns about people whose determination to become rich entangles them in harmful desires. Later, in the same chapter, he instructs those who are already wealthy not to be proud or to trust unstable riches, and he describes God as the One who gives generously for enjoyment. It would be dishonest to quote the permission while ignoring the danger. It would be equally dishonest to quote the danger as though enjoyment itself were the offence.
This makes me wonder whether we need to become more precise about our desires. I may want a car because reliable transport will change my daily life. I may want the same car because I hope somebody who once dismissed me will see me arrive. The object hasn’t changed. The story I am asking it to tell about me has. I may genuinely love travelling, and I may also want the photograph to serve as evidence that I have finally made something of myself. Both motives could exist in the same person. Honesty becomes difficult when we insist our motives must be pure before we can admit them.
We often call the desire for another person’s possessions envy. Sometimes it is. But occasionally what we are seeing is access. A person from a family with inherited assets can afford experiences, education and risks another person must work years to reach. Our desires are formed in a world where the starting lines are unequal. It is not necessarily covetousness to notice that difference, or to want the freedom that someone else has had since childhood. Neither is every way of closing that distance good. Disadvantage deserves to be named; it does not exempt anyone from the consequences of what they choose to do.
Ecclesiastes 5 acknowledges both the enjoyment of labour’s fruit and the strange failure of riches to satisfy or secure a human being. That tension sounds more like life than the messages we sometimes exchange. On one side, we are told to want more, maximise ourselves, signal success and never settle. On the other, we are sometimes told that being content means we should stop aspiring. Neither advice asks who we are becoming while we pursue the thing.
I don’t want contentment to become another word for resignation. A person can be grateful for the home they have and still work toward a safer one. A parent can appreciate their employment and still seek better pay. Someone can be genuinely thankful for public transport and still want a reliable car. Gratitude need not deny an unmet need or a legitimate preference.
But there is something I want to guard carefully. If an acquisition becomes the condition on which I permit myself dignity, peace or joy, then it has already begun governing more than my bank account. If I need to be seen succeeding in order to believe that I am somebody, the people watching me may have acquired more authority over my identity than I intended to give them.
Psalm 139 offers a prayer that is uncomfortable precisely because it invites God to search what we cannot always read accurately in ourselves. I would like to approach this week without the usual performances of humility. I don’t want us to rush to the acceptable answer, ‘All I need is God,’ and then go back to privately resenting the life we cannot afford. I want us to tell the truth in His presence.
What do I want? Why do I want it? What would be good about having it? Whom might it help? What would I refuse to do to obtain it? And if it never arrives, what part of me is at risk of collapsing with the disappointment?
Perhaps the thing to examine this week is not whether we want more. It is whether we can want more without needing it to settle the question of who we are.
— Tsholo L. Sehume