all the wrong problems, all the wrong heroes

This morning I was in a foul mood.

For no reason.

Well, for no good reason.  Last night the wife and I went and looked at this duplex in what I like to call the "Pleasantville" neighborhood of Portland.  The space was amazing.  You could park two of our current kitchens in their kitchen (which by the way had a dishwasher).  High ceilings, old world charm, heated tile floors, a bedroom the size of Australia.  And it would only be $100 more a month than what we're paying now.

We came home excitedly talking about how we would arrange our furniture and make use of all the storage, how different the neighborhood was from ours, how far we'd have to bike to get around.  We talked about our spending and our budget and our income and before you knew it, we'd talked ourselves right out of an apartment light years ahead of our own because of $100 a month.

Last week our car broke down and I spent hours researching Subarus we couldn't afford because that would solve all our problems.  This week I've grown tired (yet again) of hand-washing every dish we own, so I spent hours looking for a new place to live that will, obviously, solve all our problems.

This morning, as I realized that I need to stumble toward some understanding of contentment, I read the Daily Office and some Rolling Stone, and slowly awareness dripped into me like water through our clogged water filter on our kitchen sink: I have all the wrong problems because I have all the wrong heroes.

It's so easy for me to look around at many of my friends who are much further down the line of American Dreaminess than I am, and rather than just be happy for them, I start looking at everything in my life as a problem.  The truth is, this "problem apartment" that I find too small, was a miracle from God: we had a week to find a place to live and not only did we find a place in a great area, we're mere blocks from several different people who have become dear friends.

Somewhere along the way material gratification became my heart's song, turning Jesus into the kind of hero I would never want to emulate.  And let's face it, the fact that this apartment was a miracle 18 months ago, and today is just a closet with good lighting suggests that the problem is not with the apartment.  The problem is with me.