Does a trip to the lake, or a vacation at a hotel, or a ride on a boat cause you to be discontented with your life, and make you wish you had more stuff? I’ll admit that it happens to me sometimes.
This week my family – all seven of us – are enjoying a holiday at a cottage on a lake about an hour’s drive from our home. We love it here. It’s our best week of the year.
This vacation doesn’t cost us a cent. The cottage belongs to some friends from church, who have been very generous in letting us use it one week a year for five or six years now.
It’s stocked with all the beach and water toys you could want, including kayaks and a jet ski. They provide all the bedding and towels. We just bring our own food – and they usually leave a lot of food behind for us too.
So, every year when we come to the cottage, and we’re enjoying this great life on the lake, I start to think to myself…and sometimes even out loud to my wife…
“Wouldn’t it be nice to own a place like this? Then we could come up here whenever we wanted. It’d be great. The kids would have a blast growing up on the water. We could get a deck boat, and then we could…”
And then, gratefully, I come to my senses (without someone having to splash water on my face) and I remember that there’s a cost to owning something like this.
And not just the financial cost of buying the place. There’s the maintenance and the upkeep on two homes instead of just one for starters. And the driving back and forth from your main home to the vacation home.
Not that it’s bad for anyone to do that. After all, if these kind folks didn’t do it, we wouldn’t have such a nice place to visit each year!
And who knows, perhaps we will have a vacation home some day. Maybe as an investment property.
After all, a feeling of discontent doesn’t have to be bad. It can motivate us in a positive way to accomplish or achieve more.
But for now, I’m going to be content to enjoy the use of something without owning it.
I’m going to be grateful for the awesome privilege we have of enjoying a free week at a cottage, and for the generosity of the people who are loaning it to us. In fact, I’m going to add it to my “blessing book” right now before I forget, where I keep a running list of all the blessings that the Lord has sent my way.
And I’m going to be thankful for the life and lifestyle the Lord has given us.
But that doesn’t mean that I can’t add a vacation home to my Master Dream List. More on that next time.
Do vacations ever cause you to be discontent with what you have? How do you handle it?
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