Secret of Contentment

Young lions lie down in complete satisfaction after feasting on their prey. Despite their great strength, they have no greater ambition than satisfying their most basic natural cravings. Most animals are content with little more than food, but man has an appetite that seems insatiable. Mankind has a consciousness of value that drives us to explore every avenue, to push every limit, to tunnel through mountains, to build habitations in space, to invent a microscope like the Large Hadron Collider that is 27km long, to peer into the smallest detail of matter, in search of information ... meaning ... something that satisfies beyond mere survival.

Despite technological advances and the comforts of a modern age, man's appetite and search for contentment has not been diminished. We travel more, we eat more, we have more gadgets and comforts, and the world's information is at our fingertips. To pay for it all we work longer hours, live more complicated and demanding lives, but do these things bring us any closer to the secret of contentment?

In approximately 60 AD, a man under house arrest, bound by chains to a Roman soldier, wrote the following: "I have learned the secret of contentment, whatever my circumstances." In another letter he wrote: "As you read you will understand my insight into the mystery of Christ."

It is this secret, this mystery, that we explore in this book.