Life looks big. That’s the first thing we learn as children and some carry that perception with them through every significant stage of life. Our point of view in childhood is mostly at knees and ankles. We look up craning our necks to look into eyes that are mostly focused our direction. Eventually we look all grown up, but inside us there’s a child that keeps asking, “Am I big enough to do this?”

There are scary and demanding things out there that keep us from being all we can be. There are challenges that look at first glance to be impossible. Yet there’s also a hope that keeps us going and there’s a sense in which first steps form the beginnings of paths taken that go down the hard roads and yet lead us on a journey that’s celebrated with a deep sense of accomplishment.

It seems to me it’s the little threads of life that make our lives meaningful and that have more to do with how well we do than the big things that threaten us into a lifeless submission. I think there are little threads of hope and optimism that can lead us in new directions but where do we go to identify those strands?

Are any of you collectors? Some collect matchbooks from all over the world. Some collect musical instruments or paintings or books or CD’s. Others collect rare glassware or thimbles. My next-door neighbor in San Antonio had a collection of antique clocks. Both his living room and dining room were covered up with loudly ticking clocks. The tick-tock was bad enough, but every fifteen minutes, half the clocks would intrude upon the ticking silence with their noisy clatter. Half hours were worse and the top of the hour was utter chaos! They were unique and priceless because no one makes clocks like this any more. “Enough to raise the dead, preacher!” my neighbor said to me in a voice that rose above the racket of his expensive collection of clocks.

There is a book of the Bible that showcases a “little threads” collection gathered and attributed to King Solomon but it’s unlike my neighbor’s clock collection as there aren’t any objects saved or stored other than words and sayings. The book of Proverbs is a reminder that there was once a time when wisdom was so valued, it was saved and turned into a collection that was instructive for life. Proverbs has something to say that deals with the whole spectrum of life’s great needs.

“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” Proverbs 27:1)

Jesus took this one a step further in Luke 12 and James added a nice image to bring it to life, “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away,” (James 4:14). We all live as though there’s no end in sight until we begin to explore life’s losses and realize the vapor is us. Life forces us to come to grips with the reality that we have limits placed upon us and can’t bank on tomorrow with any certainty. I’ve come to appreciate the mystery of not knowing. It adds a spicy understanding to the gifts of the day and my ability to enjoy them as the good gifts from God given as a sign of God’s love and blessing. Tomorrow may have more blessings but I should take care to enjoy today’s gifts while they’re here and let tomorrow take care of itself as God gives us breath.

Or, how about this one?

“Go to the ant, o sluggard … observe her ways and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6)

I love this one, don’t you? What would happen if we went out in the flowerbed and lay on our stomachs and watched an ant mound with all its activity and paid attention to them? Besides being stung mercilessly, what else would you learn? There is not an ounce of laziness among them. Everyone seems to have a task they’re busy doing. In all the chaos, there seems to individual purpose and a larger goal they all seem to be working towards. Other lessons might help us understand the need to stay at it, or to work towards the building of a unified whole.

Here’s one someone from my home church gave me to guide me when I left home launched myself in college …

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)

That was helpful to me when I was asking all the questions of who was I and where was I going. It continues to be helpful because we all get to the edges of what we know and need to draw upon the wisdom of God who wants to be an active participant in our lives. Need direction? Go to God and expect God to answer.

The last little thread is problematic for those of us who cling to our need to dole out retribution to our enemies.

“If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap burning coals of fire on their heads, and the LORD will reward you.” (Proverbs 25:21-22)

There is power in reversing the order of things. When we break free from the need to protect our own interests that are defensive in nature and turn hate into love, we are swimming upstream. This is what Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. used in combating the hatred of the dominant against the hopefulness of those who were controlled by it to break free.

The little threads are actually powerful agents of change. They breathe life into the mundane. The lead rather than follow towards life that has purpose and meaning. Something to ponder…

Is it just me or is there a shortness of gladness and gratitude these days? Even when the sun shines bright on our shoulders, we have a tendency to obsess about the clouds that are forming on the horizon and miss the goodness of the moment that’s ours, right now, to enjoy. Over my computer work area is a line shared by one of my pastor friends that goes like this: The grass is greener on the other side. I say the grass is greener where you water it, mow it, fertilize it, and weed it.

“That’s not half bad,” we used to say as kids. There’s a wisdom in those lines we should pay attention to as followers of Jesus. It speaks to our need to be entertained, to be constantly full, to be recipients rather than givers. It speaks to our need to avoid pain, tedium, and everyday labor. St. Hilary said, “Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.”

Part of the problem is that our perspective is earthbound, cynical, or just tilted wrong. We expect the worst to happen and usually it does not. We expect troubles to overshadow our joy when in reality, troubles are what we make of them. Our thoughts make our realities. We think our way toward trouble and sure enough, trouble overtakes us.

Gratitude is more than playing “the Glad Game,” but it does include the open-eyed awareness that we are surrounded by goodness. Henry David Thoreau once said, “People talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.”

Here’s a Thanksgiving prayer for this week:

Almighty and gracious Father,
we give thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season
and for the labours of those who harvest them.
Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty,
for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need,
to the glory of your Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and ever.
Amen.
(from The Illustrated Family Prayer Book, edited by Tony Jasper)

At some point this week
… stop your incessant talking designed to overcome the awkward silence
… still your inner self
… look around, see all that’s right in front of you
… breathe in God’s goodness
… and give thanks.

You have breath, you have friends, and you have the bountiful gifts of God all around you. Gladness and gratitude go hand-in-hand like two lovers strolling down the lane. Be thankful!

“We drag expensive ghosts through memory’s unmade bed”
Paul Hoover, Theory of Margin

Paul Hoover writes about “memory’s unmade bed” as a way of describing all that’s within us that continues to haunt us or bless us, guide us and direct us to the place in us where the past, present and future collide. All of us live under the influence of an inner world where everything (every experience, every emotion, every thought) is stored. It’s something of a storehouse of memory where everything is remembered whether it’s consciously available to us or not and nothing is tossed aside.

I love the image poet Robert Bly created in describing the shadowy side of us we often refuse to recognize. He referred to it as “the long bag we drag behind us.” It’s heavy with the parts of us our parents or community didn’t approve of. William Booth describes this same phenomenon as “a thin gray film rolled up in a can, out of sight, but ready to transfix us with lifelike images thrown onto a giant screen or played on a husband or wife’s face.”

Bly notes that in Christian culture, sexuality usually goes into the bag. And with it goes spontaneity. Some put their individuality into the bag. Others put their inventive or playful selves in their bags. It can be a storehouse of our shame or our insecurity.

What he claims is that we spend our first two decades busily putting our hidden selves in the bag we’ve thrown over our shoulder, then we spend the remaining days of our lives either accommodating ourselves to its contents or trying to dig those things out where we can seek to understand ourselves better. I believe we spend a decade or two around dragging the bag behind us until we become curious about why we’re doing that and begin to wonder what’s in our bag that is so heavy and burdensome to carry over our shoulders. It takes courage to open the bag and investigate what we’ve squirreled away. Just peeking down into its shadowy contents can be enough to scare us away. We’d rather tote it around than try to figure out its amazing power over us.

When did you first become quizzical about your hidden self that seemed like a split-off part of you?

Men typically put their feminine selves in their bags out of sexual fear. Later at mid-life, they become aware of all they’ve lost and they go in search for what happened to their feeling self that’s capable of experiencing tenderness and human fragility. Perhaps that phenomenon is truthful and descriptive for women as well.

But it’s in the struggle that we are moved to grow. Here’s a prayer a friend wrote that captures the struggle and the power that’s ours whenever we realize our humanity has been eclipsed by the greater power of God.

Now unto the God who is able to keep you from stumbling
and present you before the presence of God,
whole and completely integrated,
your persona and your shadow,
your dominant text and your subversive text,
your scarcity and your abundance,
with exceeding great joy;
to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord;
be glory and power, dominion and majesty before all time, now,
and forevermore.
Amen.
(Chris Graham, pastor of Church of the Savior, Roswell GA)

Birdie was someone you often heard before you saw. She entered the office hallway muttering under her breath and I knew something was going down. Before I could adequately prepare myself for her arrival, she was standing at my open door and broke the silence. “Let’s go for a ride, Preacher.” It was more of a summons than a request.

Some church members have a way of keeping a pastor on his toes because they have an ax to grind about this or that. Birdie was not that kind of church member. You knew you needed to stay on your toes with Birdie around, but you never felt unsafe with her. Birdie may have an occasional ax to grind but it’s usually an ax that needs grinding. It was a subtle difference at times, but deep down, you didn’t worry about where her heart was.

We walked out to the parking lot where her rusted-out-car was gurgling unevenly. On the back bumper was a sticker that said simply, “If You Want Peace, Work For Justice.” The car had once been nice, but those days were long gone. For it to sit still like a dog on point was more than one might expect.

“Let’s have a rolling meeting,” she said to me as I tried to shove aside all the junk on the front seat so I could get in. She slipped the Dyna-Cruiser into gear and we slowly headed out for a drive.

“Preacher, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought recently and I wondered how you stood on things.” I did not succumb to the assumption that she was giving me permission to speak so I sat quietly waiting for her to resume talking. “What kind of gospel do you think we church members have to offer this old world?” Birdie slowly drove through the back streets of the community surrounding the church. She was unusually thoughtful for a minute before breaking her own solitude.

“Preacher, what do you see when you look out these windows at our neighborhood?” I must have made a thousand trips to and from church by now but I admit I was usually lost in thought about what I needed to do once I got to church. My silence was answer enough. “Not much of an answer, Preacher Boy,” she said to me.

“I’ve been trying to imagine what kind of gospel our neighbors hear when they think about what we might say to them,” she whispered softly. “Seems like Jesus thought an awful lot about what it means to have neighbors.”

We drove by a house where the tree limbs that had fallen last winter needed to be picked up from the overgrown yard. “What good news do we have to offer those folks? Probably elderly who can’t get out and do their own yard work. What does the gospel have to say to them and their needs?”

We drove by the corner convenience store where a group of Middle School kids were rushing out loaded up with sodas in plastic bottles. A pack of cigarettes was being passed between two of them. They ignored the street corner and walked directly across the traffic as if they owned the streets. “Where’s the good news for those scallawags? I’ll bet their Mommas and Daddy’s, those that’s got ‘em, wonder what they’re up to right now.”

We pulled around a corner and I recognized where we were. We drove past the Hope Care Center, a small 16-bed hospice care center for patients with AIDS. I knew about it because our church staff had been asked to provide on-going pastoral care for the patients earlier in the summer. “What kind of good news do we have for them? They’re forgotten by their families and their churches. Most of them were raised in church but the church won’t have anything to offer them now but the wrath of God. Maybe it’s no secret why this place’s so hard to find in this beat-up old neighborhood. The old religion I heard as a kid didn’t make much room for someone with a sexually transmitted disease, how about us? Do we have any good news to offer someone who’s gay or lesbian?”

Being with Birdie didn’t leave much room to dodge the tough questions. “Preacher, is our gospel big enough to offer good news to them?” Never in my mind did I ever feel so lost. I was not riding around the neighborhood with someone who was trying to get me to say something that she would use against me later. I was riding the back streets of our own church with a true believer willing to ask out loud the questions that most of us could barely utter in our thoughts.

“It makes a difference what kind of gospel we have, Preacher … It makes a difference. You and the others have got plenty of good news among you. Is it big enough to share with them that’s got none?” Birdie dropped me off at the church and I noticed a tear had run down her lustrous cheek. Neither of us could break the holy silence of the moment … not even the gurgling of her wreck of a car.