Whether we ask for them or not, the
gifts keep coming, and whether we recognize it or not, yes, they really are
gifts. We talk about grace, we go on
about God’s goodness, we mouth the words from Romans 8:28 and Ephesians 1:11,
and then something happens that makes us gasp and squint our eyes and try to
focus in on these things we have always called true. We wonder for a minute if
this might be the day, if this moment holding memories of this event, might be
the turning point of our thinking this way, these benevolent assessments of God
and his grace. Did we think it would go
on like that forever— day after lovely, blissful day of the easy gifts to call
grace? Was I expecting this— for “Give
thanks in all circumstances” to look more like counsel to everybody else than
to me in these circumstances? Is this
one thing, or this string of one thing after another hitting so close to home,
really the monkey wrench that has finally been thrown into the ageless works
that will cause every thinking person to do a double take on the scriptures
about grace and God’s sovereignty and goodness?
From now on, because of what is happening in my world, will the truth of
all matters be changed from “God is always with us working for good in
everything” to “God is sometimes good and has been known randomly to distribute
good gifts we call grace. Chin up; this could be your lucky day!”?
We don’t
want to think these things, much less come out and say them, to ask these raw
questions, so we learn not to squint our eyes and take pause when “bad” happens
to us and those we love. Instead we shake
our heads in dismay and go on figuring God must somehow know what He’s doing or allowing to be done. We have no
other choice but this God we have always known and given thanks to when all was
“good,” so, really, what sense is there in considering going down some kind of
new path now, especially when I am sixty years old, for heaven’s sake. We deem ourselves too ignorant to figure God
out, and so in a kind of ignorance-is-bliss-security blanket, we purposely
further blur the glass through which we already see so darkly.
I don’t
want to sound too authoritative about anything so mysterious as God’s designs;
I don’t mean to be glib about such profound questions. I don’t wish to hurl cynical overtones onto
the way most of us who want to be faithful to death have learned to get through
hardship and even disaster. I have
really just been trying to get your attention.
I want to offer a word of encouragement, a reminder about the baby we
might have allowed to be blurred into the bath water that needs to be thrown
out. Let’s rescue the Baby one more
time.
Here are some things I have been
reminded about lately as I have read a little book given to me by my friend,
Ellen. Have you read it? Scores of people are right now. It is One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voscamp. (My
first sentence refers to the gifts that keep coming whether we ask for them or
not. This was one of those. Although I expressly asked Ellen not to give
me a Christmas present, she did it anyway.
God told her to, and I am glad that she listened to Him!)
I knew
it—you know it, too— but we keep losing hold of it. This concept of grace is a slippery critter that the
serpent slithers up to, winds around, and slides out of our grasp. Doesn’t what
happens to me happen to you, too, when someone says after a prayer is answered
“right,” “God is so good!”? Doesn’t that make you wonder, even if you don’t rudely blurt it out to the person
who is so thrilled with God right then, “Does that mean that He wouldn’t have
been good if He had answered in another, less thrilling, way?” This has nothing
to do with whether He hears our prayers or whether our prayers have the ability
to change His mind; this has to do with whether we consider Him to be good all
the time or just some of the time. This
has to do with how we see grace and what we think it is and is not.
Ann Voscamp
writes in a compelling way that, at least for me, retards my reading speed
considerably. It is conversational, yes, but it is more “mindversational.” We are being allowed to read the way her mind talks to her before the words make
their way up through her vocal chords or past the editor that monitors her
fingers before they strike the keyboard.
She bypasses all that and lets us hear how it all first struck her. I like it and I don’t. I am impressed and exasperated. I like to do almost everything fast, and this
I can’t. If I did, I would not only miss
her artistry; I would lay waste to her deepest message. I am not here to give
you a précis; I want you to read it!
She starts
out by trying to tell us about her experience of listing in a journal one
thousand blessings. She soon learns that
this is a minute number to have chosen, for everywhere she looks there is
another one, from brown farm eggs to “stepping over a dog when coming in from
the dark.” (I am reading only snippets
of this at a time, so as I walk away into my workday, my mind picks
them out: blessings I would write down if I took a mind to. What I realized about myself— I wonder what
you will realize about yours— is that most of what I call blessings is what I
also call beauty. A large definition of
beauty, to be sure, that isn’t captured just by the eyes, but still what my
mind settles on as “beauty.” Hmm. I wonder why that is. )
But then
what is she to do with the times when the cogs gets gunked up with a son whose
hand is nearly lopped off by a fan blade and requires surgery, or memories that
won’t stay abed about her little sister being killed in the driveway and her
mother suffering its aftershock in an asylum?
What can she do about her list in light of these? I don’t even know if this means that we
cannot consider that there are easy circumstances and hard ones, happy times
and sad ones, and even, on a small scale, victories and defeats, gains and
losses. I just know that the question
she finally must ask herself about grace is valid, at least to my way of
thinking:
“What is good? What
counts as grace? What is the heart of God?
...Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a
bit of benevolence on hemorrhaging humanity?
A God who breaks through the carapace of this orb only now and then,
surprises us with a spared hand, a reprieve from sickness, a good job and a
nice house in the burbs— and then finds Himself again too impotent to deal with
all I see as suffering and evil? A God
of sporadic, random, splattering goodness— and now and then splatters across a
gratitude journal? Somebody tell me:
What are all the other moments?”
Then she reminds me— and you, too
maybe? — about how if we are taking All of It seriously that we have always
said we do, mustn’t we ask a different question?
I am awake again to see another
day. I slept through another night. I have children who love me, a companionable
husband and grandchildren to enjoy and delight over again today, just like
yesterday. Why? How come I get to do it again and again again
(no that is not a typo)?
She asks, “What if that which feels like trouble, gravel in the mouth,
is only that—feeling?”
What if it’s only us
misinterpreting? If I weren’t so
indignantly opposed to bandwagons and triteness, here I’d spout the cliché
about God’s tapestry and both of its sides, but try to picture something newer
and fresher than that which says the same thing. Cliché or not, could it be the truth? Are we just spoiled? Have we come to expect so much more-- maybe not really "more", but different--than we
should have about this life? In fact, is our "more" really less? Are we losing in all that this life tells us we should be trying to gain? Is life in
Christ really only, and no more than, what our American upbringing has taught
us about the sweet life?
