Eyes to See...Or Not (Gratitude III)

In the movie Hook, Peter Pan has left Neverland and grown older, and he returns to Neverland having forgotten what it means to be the Pan. At a dinner with the Lost Boys, he is confused as they dig into a meal, since all he sees on the table are empty plates and platters. “Believe, Peter,” one of the Lost Boys urges. And Peter does, taking a spoonful of invisible mush and splattering it onto Rufio’s face. Suddenly, he can see. There is a banquet before him, colorful, piping hot, delicious. He chooses to believe and that choice gives him eyes to see. Some things have to be seen to be believed, but some things have to be believed to be seen.

It’s a beautiful metaphor, and not too far removed from the regular invitation of Scripture. In Second Kings 6, for example, Elisha’s servant is freaking out because he and the prophet and all of Israel are outnumbered by the Arameans. But Elisha prays that his servant would have eyes to see the reality all around them. As a result, the servant sees that the hills all around are filled with angels, an army of heavenly backup.[1] That changes everything.

This idea that there are two realities—one we can see and one we can’t (at least not with natural eyes, anyway)—echoes throughout the Scripture. Paul prays it explicitly: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.”[2] He knows that there’s one reality we can see, which is often dark and dreadful. But behind it, there’s a radiant and resplendent light of hope. He prays that we can see through to this deeper reality. 

In the ancient world, it was believed that the heart and the eyes were directly connected. In The Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus says that if our eye is healthy, our whole body is full of light.[3] But he’s not just talking about our physical eyes or bodies, but about the health of our heart as the center of our being. With our spiritual eyes, we see things beyond what our natural eyes can see, where love and hope are destroying fear and death, even if this deeper reality escapes our natural mind. When we see the reality of Christ’s resurrection beyond our momentary suffering, we can know that “the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to be compared with the glory to be revealed in us.”[4]

Our work as outposts of the Kingdom—ambassadors of the Reign of God—means being people with a soft heart, full of light. Our hearts gets stuck and we need a way to unstick them; not to turn the light on, but rather to see the light that is always there. Gratitude is this switch. It’s gratefulness that gives us eyes to see and that brings us back into the story that God writes. 

Haven’t we all experienced that? You are having a horrible, no good, terrible day, but you find a way of giving thanks and your perspective changes. Everything flips, or at least you find a center of calm in the storm. On the other hand, things can be great, but if you’re not grateful, it all just becomes so much dust in your mouth. Rich people often have great anxiety because they have so much to lose! They may be rich in things, but poor in spiritual maturity, gratitude, or happiness. 

Conversely, gratitude is the one trait that consistently marks happy people, whether they have a lot or a little. You don’t need much to be rich, but you do need a grateful attitude. In fact, the most consistent trait of happy people is a consistent practice of gratitude.[5] Science, too, makes a strong case for gratitude. For example, according to the book Thanks!, “regular grateful thinking can increase happiness by as much as 25 percent, while keeping a gratitude journal for as little as three weeks results in better sleep and more energy.”[6] How beautiful that our nation enshrines Thanksgiving as a national holiday, and what a tragedy that we make it about acquiring more things—as though it’s having things and not giving thanks that makes us more human and closer to the God who made us, not to mention to one another. 

Paul writes the craziest thing from a jail cell: “Rejoice!”[7] It’s crazy because of what he endured right before this. If he’s writing from Rome, as most scholars think, then he’s already encountered stoning (imagine people threw fist-sized rocks at his head), prior imprisonment (he was probably imprisoned at least three times), shipwreck, and snakebite. He has been persecuted, abandoned, and suffered a “thorn in the flesh.”[8] But, celebrate! Rejoice, baby! You have to conclude that Paul’s either crazy, or he’s high on some wild mushrooms, or, like Peter Pan, he’s seeing something beyond sight.

Remember that engaging spiritual practice is a way of training our souls. We form habits. We train ourselves to be content. Paul has actually trained his soul into a state of joy, even in the midst of trial. In the same letter from jail, Paul says, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have.”[9] Not, “I just stumbled into it,” but I have learned. In other words, it has taken effort, intentionality, and, no doubt, trial and error, failing and going again. But the end result is gratitude and a life grounded in thanksgiving, with a heart that can see God no matter what is happening.  

Gratitude fills our hearts with light, giving us inner sight. When we can see into the beyond, we can learn to be content in the present, even when there’s great challenge in it. This, by God’s grace, will transform our lives.

Scripture tells us explicitly that the story of Israel in the desert serves as a lesson for those of us who come after them.[10] It’s a story teaching us to embody our trust in daily habits of thanksgiving. It’s a story telling us to practice gratitude. Only through gratitude can we keep our eyes open to the mercies that are new every morning, with eyes that see, in the desert or anywhere else. How important for us, who live in a violent world, filled with so much disappointment, to have eyes that see the light beyond the darkness. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] 2 Kings 6:15-17.

[2] Ephesians 1:18a, NIV. 

[3] Matthew 6:22. 

[4] Romans 8:18.

[5] Studies abound. See, for example “Gratitude: Parent of All Virtues” in http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/science-of-happiness/positive-thinking/ [July 21, 2017]

[6] See Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert A. Emmons. Houghton Mifflin, Co, New York, NY. 2007. See pages 9-11 for some of the basic science behind gratitude, though here I am quoting from a book description. 

[7] Philippians 4:4. “Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again, rejoice!” Paul writes either from a Roman jail or under house arrest.

[8] See 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.

[9] Philippians 4:11b.

[10] Psalm 95:8.

Labor to Rest (Gratitude II)

The Scripture offers extensive commentary on the history of Israel’s desert wanderings. The writer of Psalm 95 captures the nation’s refusal to trust God like this:

  Come, let us worship and bow down.
            Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God.
            We are the people he watches over, the flock under his care.
If only you would listen to his voice today!
            The Lord says, “Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did at Meribah,
            as they did at Massah in the wilderness.
            For there your ancestors tested and tried my patience,
            even though they saw everything I did.
            For forty years I was angry with them, and I said,
            ‘They are a people whose hearts turn away from me.
            They refuse to do what I tell them.’
            So in my anger I took an oath: ‘They will never enter my place of rest.’”[1]

In Exodus 16, the Israelites complained about the lack of food, and God provided manna, literal bread from heaven. But immediately after, in Exodus 17, the Israelites complained again at Massah and Meribah (which mean “testing” and “quarreling”) because they thought they were going to die of thirst. A reasonable fear, except that, as the Psalm reminds us, they had just seen God do amazing things. The problem then, was not a reasonable fear but rather hardness of heart. Hardness of heart is like eyes that can’t see, and it happens because of unbelief and lack of trust. This unbelief becomes embodied in grumbling and complaining, which is why the writer of Hebrews, much later, tells us:

See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God….As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as you did in the rebellion.” …We see that [the Israelites] were not able to enter [The Promised Land], because of their unbelief.[2]

The people were not willing to trust God’s goodness and His provision, which is the sign and symptom of a hard, unbelieving heart. And the warning for us is clear: don’t let your hearts go the same way! To be a sinner is to be trapped in an unending tendency towards worry and grumbling and complaining. But we can choose a different path. We can “labor to rest,” as the writer of Hebrews then tells us:[3]

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest [labor to rest], so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.[4]

Against the drift into grumbling, complaining, and hard-heartedness, there is one work: laboring to rest. What a paradox! Laboring to cease striving. To cease trying to make life work—or to make God work—on our own terms, and entering instead into surrender and trust. By this posture we are led into the provision of God. We are able to rest even when we don’t have all the answers. 

How fitting that right before the rebellions in Exodus 16 and 17, God had told the people: “The Lord himself will fight for you. Just stay calm.”[5] Or “you need only be still,” as one translation reads.[6] The work of the Israelites in the desert was not to take the Promised Land or even to ensure that they would survive; it was rather to learn to trust, which would lead them into all the provision they needed. Just as we labor to rest in The Jesus Paradigm in order to step out of The Human Paradigm, so we labor to rest in our trust of God, which keeps our hearts from getting hard. 

How do we do this? And how do we make this sort of rest and trust habitual? What’s the antidote to endless self-focus, scarcity-thinking, and grumbling and complaining? We turn back to Psalm 95, verse 1:

Come, let us sing to the Lord!           
Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come to him with thanksgiving.[7]

Come let us worship and give thanks. Let us walk in gratitude. The writer of this Psalm tells us both that the Israelites drifted into grumbling because their hearts became hard, and that we are able to keep our hearts soft by worshipping and giving thanks. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] Psalm 95:6-11.

[2] Hebrews 3:12, 15, 19.

[3] Hebrews 4:11, as rendered in the King James Version.

[4] Hebrews 4:9-11.

[5] Exodus 14:14.

[6] Exodus 14:14, NIV.

[7] Psalm 95:1-2.

The Drift into Hopelessness (Gratitude I)

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. [1]

― Viktor E. Frankl

God’s mercies are new every morning, but do we have eyes to see them?[2] It’s one thing to be given a present; it’s another to actually receive and unwrap it. 

My mind is like a petri dish. Many mornings it’s covered over with dark thoughts, or with sadness from yesterday, or with some foreboding about “what could go wrong.” I am often like the cartoon man with a storm cloud over his head on an otherwise beautiful day. Sometimes the day breaks and I’m still in the nighttime, even though everything around me is calling me to open my eyes. Just as we drift out of awareness of our adoption, or away from rest and into hurry, we can easily drift away from gratitude and into grumbling and complaining. 

We see this drift in Scripture, and very early. In Genesis 3, Adam blames Eve and complains that it’s the woman God gave him who caused him to stumble.[3] One of the Bible’s earliest lessons? We humans are never too far from some victim story that justifies our own bad behavior.[4] We certainly see it in the Israelites in the desert; they’re on their way to the land promised by God when they began to moan about how horrible everything is. As we read in Exodus: 

There [in the Desert of Sin], the whole community of Israel complained about Moses and Aaron. “If only the LORD had killed us back in Egypt,” they moaned. “There we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted. But now you have brought us into this wilderness to starve us all to death.”[5]

On one level, it’s a bit hard to blame them. They were in a desert, after all, and they had no food. I might throw my hands up in the air as well. But, of course, they had just seen God do ineffable miracles on their behalf! He had just parted a sea for them to pass through. So, for all of its relatability, their lack of belief is also stunning. There was something in the Israelites’ posture of complaint that blinded them to God and what He had just done for them, and to what He would surely do for them. There was something in their grumbling that caused them to drift off of God’s path of provision. There is some urge in the human heart for certainty, stability, and knowledge of how everything’s going to play out that gets in the way of faith and trust. The Pharisees, after all, also saw miracles and yet remained blind, complaining that Jesus’ healings violated their traditions.[6]

Rather than judge them (either the Israelites or the Pharisees), we might see ourselves in them; we are often just as addicted to having the world on our own terms, without the inconvenient need to be open to God—let alone trusting Him (or anyone else, for that matter). But to experience God means taking the desert and not just the miracles, and learning to keep our hearts soft amidst whatever terrain we encounter. You can inhabit the Promised Land long before you cross the Jordan River. That seems to be the message of Scripture and certainly the message of Jesus. Eternal life doesn’t begin when we die; it’s already begun. We are meant to live it here and now. What’s more, eternal life is more than a place. It’s a state of being in deep relationship with God. Many people use God to get to the Promised Land (to “go to heaven when they die”), while missing the point: God is the Promised Land.[7]

This is the reality that Israel remained blind to. We, too, can easily remain blind if we don’t find some way to fill our eyes with light. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] Frankl, Viktor. Man's Search For Meaning. Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 2006. Page 66.

[2] Lamentations 3:23.

[3] Genesis 3:12.

[4] Though much of our bad behavior is truly attached to ways in which we were victimized, maturity, nevertheless, ultimately entails taking responsibility for our own behavior no matter what was done to us, which is the only path to freedom.

[5] Exodus 16:-3-4. See also Exodus 17 and Numbers 14, and (below) Psalm 95 and Hebrews 3-4. The parallel to Matthew 4:1-11 cannot be missed. 

[6] E.g., Mark 3:1-6.

[7] We must ever be mindful of Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:22 and 25:31-46. It is transforming relationship with God that saves us (see also John 17:3).