As I was vacuuming the other day, plugging and unplugging and moving around from room to room, lugging that monster up and down stairs, I thought about the first house my wife and I rented.  One of the ways I described its size to people was that I could vacuum the entire house and never unplug the vacuum.

By then, many of our friends seem to be full steam ahead into buying houses, new cars, etc., etc.  My wife was still driving her car from college and I had logged well over 150,000 miles on whatever it was I was driving at the time.  As we watched our friends seemingly pull ahead of us in the "race" of stuff, we struggled.  Going to visit friends became a somewhat painful ordeal, as we, well, coveted their pretty homes and nice cars and all their "stuff."  We always left feeling yuck.

Then one day, one of my wife's friends confided in her how stressed she was.  "About what," Alfie said.  "Our debt.  We can't keep up with it, but we see what everyone else has and we go get it."  And the light came on for us.

My wife and I determined early on to live within our means.  I just figured that everyone else's "means" was a lot higher than ours.  Turns out that we were all at about the same income, give our take a few thousand annually.  The difference in our living situations was debt.  The bottom line was, our friends just didn't want to live in a small house where you could vacuum the whole thing without unplugging.

It's very easy when we start out as a couples to expect to be right where our parents are when we leave their house.  We don't want to start back where they started.  About the only way to do that is to start racking up some debt fast.  My wife and I had to resist the temptation to "despise small beginnings."

I've noticed that this applies not only to "stuff," but to my marriage as well.  My marriage was small in the beginning, but it has continued to grow.  Communication has gotten better.  Sexual intimacy has gotten better.  Everything has gotten better.  But we have sure had to have incredible patience along the way, as we nurtured and waited for things to take root and grow.

Something else I've noticed is that discontentment can stick with you your whole life.  There's always someone else with more.  Learning contentment early on is something that will make huge payoffs in the future.  God gives us exactly what we need in the moment and season in which we're living.  Don't miss the great blessing of now, wishing it away for the next big thing.  You're in it right now.