Our sons were typical children in many ways. They loved to eat and play. But they also kept wanting more. They wanted to play soccer, they wanted to have bikes to ride, and they hated doing homework. The one lesson we found most difficult to teach was how to be content.

Our whole culture is built around wanting more—the biggest, the fastest, and the most expensive. We are conditioned from childhood to want things in order to be satisfied, either by means of advertisements, social media, or influencers. We fail to believe that we have enough. Not only do we not have enough money, we lack enough time to enjoy the things that we possess.

This has led to the diminution of the significance of relationships, because we tend to value people inversely to how we view people. Others simply become objects to help us obtain what we strive to get, whether approval or satisfaction or love. Life is lived at an ever-hurried pace to achieve our goals.

That is what makes adoption special. We give of ourselves materially in order to invest in the children we adopt. We get a new perspective on relationships as we begin to see family as more important than success or wealth. Our children teach us new values even as we seek to train them. We begin to learn contentment.

Being content means that we make choices based on our perspective of God and eternity. We want to please Him first of all, and serve those around us (especially our family) with our time and talents. As our family grows, we also start developing more human connections, like the roots of a tree spreading.

What thing(s) have you found help you develop contentment? How do you plan to pass this along to your children? Please feel free to comment on this below.