Better Than Blessed: Grateful
One time I was in the buffet line at one of my high school friend’s wedding receptions and all at once I was standing across the table from the bride’s dad, someone in whose house I’d slept over many a’ time and in whose kitchen I’d eaten many a’ snack. Everyone was smiling ear to ear, and it was definitely so with this man, his daughter just minutes before happily wed on a crisp Fall day.
Striking up conversation, I said “Mr. Fleming, it’s been awhile! Is it too much to ask for you to update me on the last twenty years of your life?” Chuckling at my small talk charm, he stabbed a piece of cheese or two and then looked at me, a progressive seriousness taking over his face, and said, “My family and I, we’ve been healthy and happy. Truly, God has blessed me.”
I knew what he meant: he had been experiencing wellbeing, and, rather than take credit for it himself, he wanted to give all the glory to his Creator. I can appreciate Mr. Fleming’s regard for the Divine’s power over his life and the wish for humility to present to me over ego.
It’s just that then there’s this: I’d lost two parents to cancer and a child to a congenital heart condition in those same twenty years. Lots of those days I was dealing with illness and bottomed-out grief, not health and happiness.
Because it was a wedding and the father of the bride had better things to do, I resisted my urge to corner Mr. Fleming in a theological debate to ask whether he believed the converse of his statement to be true: had he not benefited from health and happiness the previous twenty years, would he have discerned that to mean an absence of blessings by God in his life? My guess is that he wouldn’t subscribe to this notion; my experience with his faith was that it was more complex than that. But, for me, his original assertion comes dangerously close to saying it: I’m blessed when things are going well. I’m not blessed when they’re not.
There’s a personal story I want to share that took place in the season leading up to our son, Duncan’s, passing. As background, we had a trying nearly five months of his life, caring for his twin brother, Jackson, while overseeing Duncan’s delicate health. With Duncan’s heart condition, we were pretty regularly in and out of the hospital, managing lots of medications, and overwhelmed by the task of making sure his coloring, feedings, and poops were all within the parameters we’d been taught to look for. We were exhausted. After a while, the wear and tear began getting the best of Scott and me. We became icy with one another and eventually even icy towards life.
One night Scott and I were lying in bed at night, weary and mad, wide awake. I said to Scott in the darkness, “I don’t know about you, but I feel like for a while now we’ve been sitting here giving the middle finger to The Universe. And that’s no way to live.”
Scott agreed but said, “Well, maybe, but we feel that way because The Universe is giving us the middle finger.”
And, I’m telling you, that made me feel better.
For approximately seventy-five seconds.
I think at different points both Scott and I came to the conclusion that by parenting a sick, frail kiddo neither the Universe nor God was flipping us off. We also discovered that exhaustion was ok, confusion was ok, but bitterness was not. It would chew us up and spit us out, spirits disfigured and dark, if we kept up our anger at our circumstance, our middle fingers up at God.
There’s one reason I can walk away from that wedding reception buffet conversation, the season of Duncan’s illness and ultimate death, and other stinkin’ hard seasons of my life not feeling permanently sorry for myself. Or permanently bitter and cynical. Or permanently angry towards God. And it is this: I’m not sure God was pulling the strings to make any of it happen.
Rather, I’ve always believed the thread between good and bad circumstances and God’s favor is as mysterious and precarious as a wispy, single spider web strand. If I’m being honest, I actually wonder if the two places are connected by anything at all. Could it be that the associations we make between situational wellbeing and God’s blessings are made by us alone, not God? Could it be that we’re the ones who so badly want to draw thick threads, make direct correlations, form one-to-one correspondences? I know in my weak moments, my human nature has a hard time resisting the allure of the (false) promise that if we do good we get good and if we do bad we get, well, less than good – that if our faith is strong we will be rewarded, and if it is off course stuff starts falling apart.
Kate Bowler, in her book Everything Happens for a Reason, and Other Lies I’ve Loved, describes the intersection of her graduate-level research at Duke University on America’s propserity gospel with her own out-of-nowhere stage four cancer diagnosis. She explains that, especially in America, we are obsessed with fairness, and we displace this obsession onto God: “What would it mean for Christians to give up that little piece of the American Dream that says, “You are limitless”? Everything is not possible. The mighty Kingdom of God is not yet here. What if rich did not have to mean wealthy, and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.”
So how is it that we dodge this “justice epidemic,” this culture-and-religion-satured obsession that demands there be a reason for everything? How do we focus our attention away from what we perceive to be God’s orchestration of the ebb and flow of our evolving circumstances and instead on the loving presence of God in (and sometimes despite) everything that happens to us?
To take a stab at it, I think the message I’ll start with my own kids is this: Your lives will not be easy, my little friends – no matter how smart or good or ethical or wise or dumb or bad or immoral or foolish you are. I want them to understood life to be exactly what it is: messy, imperfect, unstable, wild, scary, and unfair. I want them also to understood it to be lovely and wonderful and inspiring and full and rich.
But nowhere, notime, nohow will I promised that things will work out the way they want or think they should, that they deserve anything different from what they get.
I can’t promise my kids an easy life, but I can offer promises of a different sort: that God saves us in the storm, not from the storm. And that we benefit from praying to change ourselves, not others or circumstances. And that hard is not the same thing as bad. And that hard things happen to faithful people. And that, like Brene Brown says, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen,” so we ought to drop all pressures we put on life or we’ll wind up discontent as hell. And that we learn lessons from The Crap but that The Crap isn’t necessarily conjured up by God just so we can learn them. And that God’s love and blessings aren’t conditional. And that well is different from happy; we don’t have to be happy all the time – it’s normal to experience the full range of emotion. And that life is not easy. Have I mentioned that life ain’t easy?
I also want to teach, as Rabbi Harold Kushner illustrates in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, that there’s a ton of thread behind the tapestry of life – knots and loose threads and tangles – and that we rarely get glimpses, unless we happened to be enlightened and sometimes in hindsight but most likely once we’re on the other side of life, of the view of the masterpiece. We’re mostly on the back side blindly getting into knots and running out of string and bamboozled by how tangly everything is, all the while just a piece of fabric away from a design more perfect than we can imagine.
So, hear me say this: I don’t think our circumstances are directly correlated to God’s blessings. Mostly life is just being life, both beautiful and terrible; it’s neutral in its dealings which means it’s never personal.
Then, hear me say this: I think everything is mysteriously interconnected and in God’s purview and deeply doo-doo-doo-doo Twilight Zone and capital-I-Inspired.
Also: Did you know I have a big, big, big mouth, which is the only reasons I can successfully talk out of both sides of it?
No, seriously. There isn’t contradiction here; there is nuance. Nuance, people! There can be God’s inspiration and Life’s randomness. Better, God’s inspiration existing somehow behind Life’s randomness. I sort of love that instead of a linear strand existing between God’s attitude towards us and what life puts before us, we instead get a geometrically genius web, a masterpiece, a tapestry.
Truth is, I like my life and love a little edgy and a lot unpredictable (it’s a hell of a lot more exciting that way). And I can handle all the ambiguity (and unexplained pain) that leaves me with. As my senior pastor says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” With how uncertain I am about how it all works, my faithfulness is up there with the likes of Mother Theresa.
So here I am, many, many years past the season of loss - my son and my parents’ absences still real but not nearly as raw - and my family is encountering a rather exceptional season of stability; we are well, healthy, and thriving.
So where does that leave me?
I prefer not to think of myself as blessed, which infers that God alone determines what cards I get dealt. And I prefer not to think of myself as lucky, which infers that absolutely nothing determines what cards I get dealt. I definitely prefer not to feed my own credit-hungry ego, as though my own work alone determines what cards I get dealt.
Instead, I prefer a nuanced stance that doesn’t need to be certain about what determines what cards I get dealt.
So, I’m left with this: gratefulness. I prefer simply to be grateful for what cards I get dealt.
Gratefulness is like a sticky, sweet honey. Once you begin layering it on your life, you will find you can’t stop with the stuff.
Gratefulness removes all the query around who and what is behind the curtain (God? Nobody? Us?) and puts Life itself at the center of attention.
Gratefulness says “I don’t know why I’m going through X, and I don’t need to know why I’m going through X, but I am open to going through X, because the fact is I’m already going through X.”
Gratefulness is a choice to be the canvas upon which both sides of the tapestry are playing out; on the one side you believe there’s perfection unfolding and on the other side a knotty mess is unfolding and you are in the middle, a witness to it all.
Gratefulness means you are more accepting and you are more present to what is going on right before your eyes, every moment of it. You feel the rain, you feel the sunshine, you feel the grey, you feel the whippy wind, you feel the refreshing mist and you say, “I see you. I thank you for being here.”
Gratefulness transcends the duality of happy/sad and allows us to rest in a more elevated, sacred space. You don’t have to define your mood when you are grateful, but, because gratefulness encourages positivity, it will almost always guarantee a lift in it.
Gratefulness keeps you from attending to what you don’t have and instead wakes you up to what is right under your nose.
Every person I have met who is actively experiencing emotional wellness is actively practicing gratefulness. I want to be one of those people. Don’t we all?
Thanksgiving is imperfect because of all of its historical misnomers, but it’s my favorite holiday because it puts at the center of our feasting of life the most important aspect of it: that we are to be grateful.
Am I blessed? Maybe. Am I lucky? Maybe. Am I a product of my own hard work? Maybe.
