Category: Choices

Rescuing Gratitude

Rescuing Gratitude

Gratitude is a funny thing. For many of us, it’s foundation is obligation.

The bank teller handed you a lollipop – “What do you say?”

In the days after your birthday – “Have you written your grandmother that thank you note yet?”

There was an edge of guilt in the reminders, even while parents who loved us were trying to build good habits in us. At its worst, the obligation to be grateful extended to something unintentionally abusive – the expectation to be thankful for things that were forced upon us, even if sometimes “for our own good.”

There’s a lot to rescue gratitude from.

For me, it’s had to be rescued from the misuse of the biblical injunction to “be thankful in everything, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

Combined in good faith with Romans 8:28 (“And we know that all things work together for good to them who love God and are called according to his purpose.”), this command to be thankful resulted in an all too toxic approach to life.

Your daddy died? Be thankful.

Your child has cancer? Be thankful.

Your marriage is miserable? Be thankful.

You lost your job? Be thankful.

You long for a partner and yet remain single? Be thankful.

You’re being bullied in school? Be thankful.

Your friends are moving on and leaving you behind? Be thankful.

We learn that grieving is bad, and even worse, that we must name evil as an illusion – it is merely good in disguise. This kind of gratitude demands we be unfaithful to our own hearts, a “death to self” of the entirely wrong kind.

True gratitude need not be forced. It is a right and natural response to good things, good gifts. To love itself, in all its forms.

Which doesn’t mean discipline is not involved, but it’s not a discipline of learning to force thankfulness. It is the discipline of noticing, of seeing, of being open to being surprised.

There are many things I want, good gifts I long for that are delayed or denied. That is real and I have learned to make space in my heart to grieve them. But that doesn’t mean I cannot be grateful for other things too. The sunshine streaming through an eastern window in the morning. The Lake in all its moods. A smile of greeting from a stranger and their dog. The warm welcome of a friend. The finicky coziness of a persnickety cat. A song that puts words to my pain and longing. An unexpected hope.

These are gifts. They may not be the ones I was looking for, but if I learn to keep my eyes and heart open to them, they can draw forth gratefulness. 

And learning that openness has shaped and changed me. It has grown patience in me – not much, but exponentially more than I started with! I have learned not to just wait for the gifts I want, but to go looking for them with my eyes open for unexpected treasures along the way.

It has made me realize that sometimes the unexpected treasure is worth more than what I knew to look for.

It has taught me to be open to being surprised. My imagination for goodness continues to be expanded and stretched.

It has taught me that both hope and disappointment are alike adventures. Enter into one and you will always find the other. And there is always more.

It has taught me that I do not have to stop walking, stop moving forward, to grieve. That, in fact, grieving is itself a way of moving forward – if I find myself stuck in sorrow or anger, I am no longer actually grieving, and there is work to be done.

And as long as I am moving forward, I can be surprised into gratitude.

Is God in Control?

Is God in Control?

“God is in control.”

I’ve heard that a lot recently, from people across the span of political views, and it doesn’t sit right.

We can argue endlessly (as Christians have for hundreds of years) about how divine sovereignty and human action interact. I’m not interested in that.

What I am interested in is how we are using the idea of God’s sovereignty and what it’s producing in us.

If saying “God is in control” helps us let go of obsessing over things we truly have no control over or influence on to focus on the things we can change, then it’s doing a good work in out lives.

One of the most significant things in my own life over the last several years has been taking the Serenity Prayer seriously:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

But I feel like too often in my own life, saying “God is in control” has been working in ways more destructive than constructive.

Too often it has been a way of spiritualizing passivity. I feel afraid and overwhelmed and don’t know what to do – or don’t want to do the things that need to be done. So I opt out. “God is in control. God will take care of it.”

But God generally does God’s stuff through  “the body of Christ.” That would be us. We are God’s active expression of Godself in the world. When we pray, “Thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” we aren’t praying for some abstract thing to happen around us. We are asking (or should be) for something to happen through us.

That staggers me – that God would choose to use such confused and flawed creatures to accomplish his work.  But God does, and all he expects is that we do our best.

As my understanding of the world and what God is doing in it has expanded and shifted and changed, the work I feel called to do has expanded and shifted and changed as well. I embraced those changes with fear and trembling. I had to wrestle with the question, What if I’m wrong?

I could be – but I trust Jesus in my journey and do my best to be faithful. I believe Love is doing beautiful and healing things in the world and I do my best to join in that work. And every time I pray, “Thy kingdom come and thy will be done,” I add, “…even if I am missing it altogether.”

Saying “God is in control” too often minimizes our responsibility.

God gives us real choices with real impact in the world. We choose to care for the poor and the outcast, or to ignore and abandon them. We choose to fight for justice, or to assume it will happen without us.

We choose to love one another, or to turn from love.

These are real choices with real consequences and impact. God in his sovereignty has given us control. He calls us to make choices of his love, but he doesn’t intervene when we don’t.

Intervening is our job as well.

Terrible things happen in this world because we choose them. Terrible things are stopped in this world because we choose to intervene. And beautiful and loving things happen in the world because we do them.

The Jewish Scriptures lay it out quite clearly:

“Today I place before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Now choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

God in his sovereignty has given us real control. Real choices. And because God is life and love, all of creation is drawn to union with the divine source of everything good.

But we get lost, and we lose each other.

So choose life, and love. Choose finding ourselves and each other and everything good we can make of this world. Every good gift God has given us to choose.

 

Love in a Multiverse

Love in a Multiverse

So many things could have been different.

Everything, really.

Sometimes I think of who I might be if my daddy hadn’t died. It’s an entirely different life, an entirely different me, so different I can’t imagine.

This universe with this particular me is only one of an infinity of possibilities. So many choices –many mine and many not – have created this one. But the others are there, too.

There’s the one where I died, as I nearly did, before I was even two.

There’s the one where I went to the secular university I wanted to, a completely new world, instead of the Baptist university I’d grown up at. I wonder who I’d have turned out to be.

There’s one where the first boy I dated in my mid-twenties decided I might be his type after all and I married him as I was ready to do. I don’t doubt we could have made a good life together, a good family. But I would be a very different me – a far more conventional me.

There’s the one where the first boy I kissed didn’t have the sense to recognize that we fit in all the worst possible ways. I wouldn’t have had the sense to walk away myself, and we would’ve been a disaster.

There’s the one where I never stopped and went back to check out the book with the scandalous title – “A New Kind of Christian” – on the new non-fiction shelf at the public library. Who would I have been had I not found others were asking the questions I was? Thinking the thoughts I was? And that there was somewhere to go with those thoughts? Had I not found a path out of fundamentalism?

It gave me life but it was smothering the life out of me.

There’s the one where my seminary boyfriend wasn’t so afraid. I’d be different had we stayed together. I would’ve held myself back, and I don’t know that we could’ve made it.

There’s the one where I never got that shove into real dating. Never got past the fear of that unknown. Never found my way through the risks to know who I am and the freedom to explore who I can be.

And there’s the one where I never met you. Never was challenged by our conversations, never shaped by the dance of our friendship. Never had to figure out who I am in just the ways who you are pushed me to. Never had to think about your questions and change because of the answers. Never learned to love in the particular way you were there to love.

You’re the reason this is the universe I’m in instead of so many others that could’ve been.

(Inspiration owed to the brilliant ending of La La Land and the songwriting of Heather Styka.)

Here (a monologue)

Here (a monologue)

So many years
Trying to live as someone other than who I am

Because I didn’t know

I didn’t know I wasn’t who everyone told me I was
(Or didn’t)
Who else was I supposed to know to be?
When the only language you hear (know)
Doesn’t fit
Collecting a piece here
Catching a glimmer there
And finally taking a leap
To see what I could find
(It wasn’t where I was)

And you were there
Here
Wherever it is I am
You were always there
(Here)
Wherever I wasn’t ready to be
But getting there
(Here)
There
Where when I pinch myself I can feel it
Now

Maybe I’ll need to leap again
Ask the questions of becoming
Wonder
Wander
Off the path (another one)
And you’ll be there
(Here)

Won’t you?