I’m Satisfied, Lord. I’m Satisfied.
On Yielding Preference and the Sacred Intelligence of Enoughness
This isn’t the first time I’ve spoken of Gerry Jud—my beloved teacher, the founder of Shalom Mountain—and his radiant declaration: “I’m satisfied, Lord. I’m satisfied.”
His voice, full of childlike glee and quiet knowing, still echoes in my cells.
It’s a refrain I’ve returned to many times. A compass point in my own journey.
But lately, a new layer has opened.
Because Gerry also used to say something else, just as potent: “I yield my preferences to God.”
And suddenly, the pairing struck me—not just as connected, but as inseparable.
One ecstatic. One surrendered. Together, a doorway into a wholly different way of being.
You see, preference—when tangled in the need to feel okay—is born of dissatisfaction.
We chase what we think will fix us, soothe us, finally prove we’re safe. But no matter how much we rearrange the furniture of our lives, the hunger remains.
Because dissatisfaction isn’t healed by getting what we want.
It’s healed by remembering we already are what we long for.
To say “I’m satisfied” is to drop the rope. To stop arm-wrestling the moment into our image of how things should be. It’s to recognize that enoughness isn’t something we earn by perfecting the external—it’s a sacred homecoming that begins here, in the unedited now.
And yielding preference doesn’t mean denying desire.
It means loosening the grip.
It means letting our preferences kneel at the altar of Life’s unfolding, rather than demanding Life submit to them.
When I yield my preferences, something in me softens. A war ends. I stop holding reality hostage to my conditions for happiness—and I start participating in its wild, generous intelligence.
Satisfaction rises like a tide, not because I got what I wanted, but because I let go of needing it to be otherwise.
And in that release, something more profound than preference awakens:
Presence.
Clarity.
Joy that doesn’t require a reason.
I fall through preference into presence.
Through control into contact.
Through resistance into radiance.
This is the deep intelligence of enoughness.
So I’ll say it again, not as a conclusion but as a beginning:
I’m satisfied, Lord. I’m satisfied.
Not because life is easy.
Not because I’ve surrendered once and for all.
But because in this breath, in this body, I remember:
There is nothing missing.
And I am here.