Gratitude

On our short drive to a friend's house today, Addy asked me a question that I quickly summoned an answer to, but then realized - I don't actually know the answer to. Her question and my answer, within a matter of just a few minutes, awoke me from a lifelong state of indifferent observation and jolted upon me a deep spell of true, inspired gratitude - a new, brighter, lighter lens through which to see and love this world.

She asked me: "How do they make roads?"

"Well," I replied quickly. "There used to be just big grassy fields everywhere, and then they removed the grass with big machines and made dirt roads so that people could go from over here to over there. Then, they discovered how to make cement, and now construction workers pour cement and then smooth it out, and then it dries and becomes a road!"

Wow, what a logical yet absolutely speculative answer. I was content with my mediocre attempt - it might have even followed the synoptic lineage of road history. But Addy remained silent, peering out her car window, unimpressed. Or perhaps she had forgotten that she had asked the question. Or maybe, just maybe, she wasn't asking for an answer but just speaking a question.

After I offered my rapid and incomplete answer, I was struck - literally - slammed, into a place of humility. A place of awe. A place of true, sincere gratitude. I don't know why it was this moment, or this question, but it just - happened. I realized - how do I know how roads are made? Do I really know how roads are made? Who made this very road that I was driving on today? Did I sweat their sweat or design their blueprint? And what came before? Who created the grassy fields upon which the farms and farmers and wildlife imprinted their temporary existence that was then, for them, home. Footprints of their toils that were, for them, their whole hard life. In that moment, I realized that I look around my world and act as though I am its creator. As if I paved each road. As if I planted these trees that line my street or that speckle the forest landscape of my highway drive. Accordingly, it would seem, from my indifference to them, that I also erected all the buildings of my life, these stores here or those churches there or that mighty skyscraper here or that shelter there. I do not think, hardly even consider, the life that went into their foundations - the dripping tears and sweat of those real people who conceived of their vision, who gathered the materials, and who poured themselves out, day after day, to raise those standing walls - right there - from nothing but bare earth of the ground and the endless hard work of hands and minds, all working together. This is my world that I pass by everyday, without gratitude. Without care or thought.

I think about how boastful I can be about all the stuff that fills my life. The dressers and chairs and the over-the-counter medicines and the running water and even the walls of my home. How can I be surrounded by creation I don't really see or hardly ever say "Thank You" for? I think about my travels throughout the world - admiring the ancient buildings in Tunisia or the cobblestone roads of Germany or the mighty Alps in Switzerland. I admired them as much as I admired myself for being there, to witness them. But I stood inside those moments without true gratitude. Without simple humility. If I was grateful, it was for the opportunity. It was for having the means to be there or for having a camera to snapshot it into my life book of been-there and done-that. Thinking now - I did not fight the wars to wrestle those lands to freedom, I did not lay those old Bavarian cobblestone streets, stone by stone by stone. I did not love the walls of those ancient towers or cry at the mercy of their wreckage. I did not inspire those mountains of beauty. And I did not paint their cloud-washed view, the miracle of sky - so inexplicably majestic but yet a dimension of nature that needs no science, only human eyes, to discover. From the simplicity of a turning wheel to the intricacies of a thousand languages to the broadness of the starry night sky to the smallness of a computer microchip. This is the stuff that fills our everyday life. This is the stuff of our world that we consider ours, or ours enough to take for granted. For me, I offer such small, piecemeal gratitude, such shallow and temporary gratefulness, that I wonder why it all doesn't disappear in a dream so that I may awake, exasperated by its fullness and awed by its bounty.

Sometimes our lack of gratitude is an abundance of awe that is chaneled toward the wrong things. We scan the grand libraries and wall-to-wall books of a scholar, admiring him greatly for his expansive collection, how well-read he must be, and how much wisdom he must know. We admire him as if he authored every one of those books or imparted by self-endowment the entire wall of his knowledge. And even so, did he wire his trillion synapses or pare the tree for parchment? Did his hands build those shelves or his inventiveness light that lamp above his reading chair? Or, if we don't admire him, then we ridicule him, smirking critically - why does he spend his time so, reading these works that translate so unsubstantially to a life that really matters? Or, if we don't ridicule him, then we envy him - feeling ourselves inadequate, unread, or unenlightened by comparison, wishing in a small private way that we could be more like him, jealous of his accomplishments and depreciative of our meager own. When we judge others, for good or for bad, we are, at the same time, judging ourselves. As we stand on the sideline in observation of others, we are judging their lives, their accomplishments, their doings and their sayings as who they are against our self-judgment of who we are not, or, vice versa. Why, why is this so? Why does criticism, envy, and self-depreciation, or, just the opposite - boastfulness and self-proving, rise so quickly to our surface while gratitude stays locked from our hearts or silent from our lips? Why can we not appreciate the work and life of others, and all the stuff of life, and release that gratitude from our clenched fists?

Yes, gratitude does come to us, even overwhelms us at times. As a mother, it comes - that glowing moment, as we stare deep into the eyes of our newborn babies, these little lives we carried but know we did not by our own labor create. How? How! These tiny fingers, these yearning eyes, this fragile paper skin? It is all too miraculous for answers; it can only be contained in question. Or as parents, watching our children grow into themselves - learning and leaping into life before we can explain to them, or to ourselves, just quite how. Why we are not more alive in this kind of gratitude but instead half asleep most days with indifference, I do not know. Why we do not burst alive with "Thank You!" moments each day for no reason except to throw joy into the air because we must, because we literally cannot cap our wonder - I do not know.

It is difficult, plainly yes, when we are sunk into our suffering, struggling with the madness of complexity, the chaos of details, the annoyances of daily life or the incurable hurt of others - it is hard to envelope gratitude when our hearts are gripped otherwise with pain, anger, or isolation. We look at these dark things as the "stuff of life." But are they, really? Or other times, we are gripped inside ourselves. We become our own scholar - admiring all that we know and all that we have as though they are the fruits of our own toilsome labor, or the brilliant creation of our working mind in solitude.

Knowing that this is so far from the truth; knowing that this world of ours is not truly ours but His; knowing that we should give thanks to each other for what we each add to our world by our talents and our love, and ultimately, giving thanks to God - for the wonder that is life, that is science, that is family, that is nature, that is play, that is art, that is conversation - for that which is the deep and beautiful connection between all things living and all things provided - this is humility. This is love for others. This is joyfulness to God. This is, in its basic and broadest essence, gratitude: true, affectionate, unbridled, jubilant thankfulness for all things, great and small.

I am awake and alive as I look about me, right now, as if I had never seen our world this way before. In this very moment, as Addy lay sleeping on the couch after a long afternoon of play, I thank God that she earlier asked me her question, and that she resides in a place where holy curiosity is her instinct and not in a place where she offers all the answers. I feel called to go there, to run to where she is, inside that vivid place of holy curiosity and instinctive wonder, and to love in gratitude, this world, simply - as if I was a child. Because, in God's eyes, I am.

Undefined

It is undefinable, the conscious knowing that I do not know much beyond a remote absolute nothing really. Thinking about Tripoli. Thinking about Iraq. Thinking about Taiwan. Thinking about Somalia. Thinking about the oppression of entire nations. Thinking about the largeness of genocide and the smallness of genocide. The universal moment of excruciating, unbearable pain inside one small child. Thinking about the solid repression against his innocence, carved into him, a tiny body. That he may be one suffering life over the moon, or decades gone, or just a mile from my own city. I do not know. He remains there, undefined in shadows.

It is undefinable, the thinking about the million complex layers webbed upon our human history where one flashing moment everywhere is changed absolutely by one conscious heart, trying and alive, scattered amongst the billion spread of rising dust and dying stars falling century after century after century. Red blood pumping, trying, living, and dying. Drops of star water. To me, I look to my sky and I see only rain. I feel only water. But I know, it is so much more. Heavens tear open people's anguished skies and pour down rains of so much more. How I can feel water when I know others bear tears of steel and sheets of fire? I know not what to do. I know nothing, not even what I know to write.

It is undefinable, the knowing that a person is suffering my human death, unmine, and living so definitely inside my own cement temple that I do not suffer any pain from unknowing. For most cement moments of my life.

But in these other moments, glass and thinking, paper and feeling, these here, the undefinable ones - it is beyond moral comprehension to know. To know even which one question to ask. It is beyond my trifle science, and limitlessly beyond my single judgment against those in positions who do not decide but who must decide, against those in positions who must defend or who cannot defend, who must defy or who must defect, or even those who must stand up or must lay down and die. I stay still to this chair, aside so far from any such position.

But in this undefinable moment, I find myself yearning, an unbreakable hurt, toward what stands between me and him my one small child, feeling altogether and together, we, helpless against this universe except to write him into prayer: Pray save his heart, that His heavens pour upon him Water of Life, the day's great rains, and to him emerge, undefined between hardened walls of life, into what is eternal - his tiny sacredness, defined, and loved without boundary beyond these shadows.

Evolution of Belief

They believed.
Raised me to believe.

Childlike
Belief.
Naively believed.
What is belief?
Wondered if I believed.
Believed I believed.
Needed proof to believe.

Worried
If I believed.
Tried to believe.
Wished I believed.
Questioned belief.
Doubted I believed.
Forgot about belief.
Why believe?

Revisited
Belief.
Challenged belief.
Frustrated with belief.
Ridiculed belief.
Too good to believe.
Complete self belief.

My children are born.

I asked myself:
Do you believe?
I answered: I don't know anymore
What I believe.
Ran through the motions
As if I believed.
Waited.

Nothing.
Resigned to
Just pretending I believed.
And to my children,
Preaching belief
Without living belief.

Shock.
A simple question.
One day, He asked:
Do you believe in Me?

Terrified. Disbelief.
He knows my simple answer:
No.
I do not believe.

The loneliest torture.
I can't believe.

Waited.
Waited.
Waited.
Wrote.

Realized,
Broken self belief,
And incomplete.

Listened.
The page told me:
You need belief.

He told me:
You need Me.
I answered: Yes.
I prayed: Please.

Opened.
Confessed.
Surrendered.
I see.

Now
By God's grace,

Yes.
I believe.

One Small Soul and Whole

It is perhaps the greatest and most mighty act
In all thirty years of my own life revolution
When I unhitched my orbit around myself to
Unbecome.

To lift my face with two clasped hands to
Re-become.
To recognize a planet self
No more or less than one small soul, and
Whole.

Not ashamed to kneel humbly before God.
To confess in truth that I have sinned.
To ask Him for His forgiveness.
To believe in Jesus Christ, my Savior.

These are my elements.

Today I rejoice in removing myself
From my very center.
And in my place,
His Grace. The Cross -
Gravity of new life given to me.
Sun of a reborn universe.

Letter to John

Dear John,

I feel a true need to thank you for your sermon two weeks ago. To you it was another Sunday, another sermon, and another hope that you might, that day, reach someone's heart. As you stood before all of us, speaking, I felt so strongly that you did just that. I felt you speaking, directly to me. For me. Asking me very kindly to listen to your story. And like a small miracle, I did. I want to thank you for your words, for your ability to preach with humility and a very true love for God.

I was raised Presbyterian and attended church regularly throughout my childhood, but my connection to God was really my connection to the life of my church, my fellowship with the friends and the family and the people of God, and not to the Life of God. I did not know this then. As I left to go off to college, I did not return to God. God was in the walls of a church I no longer attended, and so, God slowly eroded away. Finally, and I do not know exactly when, but I bid Him adieu and propped myself upon a pedestal of self-belief. This is where I stayed until I fell - all the way down, knees to the ground. I did not know that I was falling before Him. I just knew that I had fallen. That I needed help.

For so long I have not been able to quite understand what my tangled issues with my faith were, but I now know - it was simply that I felt - ashamed. Ashamed for trying too hard to pray to God, but never feeling Him listening. Ashamed for taking communion and not being able to concentrate on Jesus' sacrifice for me, but rather, allowing my thoughts to float elsewhere, often - to thoughts of doubt and my private intellectual conversations about the futility of religion in general. And perhaps, most of all, ashamed of baptizing both of my children and having a closed heart as I did. My decision to baptize my children was rooted in my love for my family, and not for my love for God. I did not know why I had been running from faith, but now I know - this is why. I ran from faith because I had none, but I was too ashamed for so many years to acknowledge this. I kept myself from thinking about it long enough or deeply enough so that I would never have to truly know myself or admit that I was a sinner. I was always - too good, too proud. My mistakes were mistakes and never - sins. Now I think - how selfish and how foolish, but this is how the wheels of my life turned.

My parents, bless them both, raised me, nourished me, to believe in God, but I have now realized - no one else can believe for me. Only I have the power to believe. It is mine to turn towards or, to turn away. And for many years, I have turned away, walked away, and resigned to believing that God merely equaled my awe of infinite scholarship and science and nothing more.

Danny, Addy, Joey and I moved to Springfield in October of 2009, and we would sporadically attend various churches on Sunday. Speaking for myself, I wanted to go to church because it felt like the "right thing to do." The right thing for our children. But over the last few years, the shame became too much for me. Each time I sat in church - any church - I felt like a fraud - sitting in those pews, sitting amongst believers, taking communion, bowing my head in silent thought but never silent prayer. I realized a few months ago - I literally could not pray. My heart was shut. My eyes - closed.

A few months ago, we attended Southside while you were having a family sermon, with a really great potluck organized after church. I almost had a panic attack. Danny wanted to stay, to mingle, to eat, and to let the kids play. But I needed to leave, and to do so immediately. I felt intense shame and intense - anger. I had no idea why. But now I know. It is because I could not sit and break bread and enjoy fellowship with Christians when I was a non-believing stranger - walking in at the most convenient lunch hour, no less. And more than that, more than anything - it was because I would be there, committing a lying act in front of my children. To my children. Watching me there, at church, pretending as though I belonged when really I brought them there with such little true faith or belief in anything.

Now I know, God was asking me that day - "Do you believe in Me?" For so long, I felt unaccountable to God. Unaccountable to anyone. But on that day, the day of the potluck, God came to me and asked me: "Do you believe in Me?" and I ran away from Him, terrified, because I could hear myself. I could hear my voice. It was answering: "No." I was angry because I felt caught. I was terrified because, for the first time, I felt the need to be accountable. The need to be honest. To God and to myself.

There are many things that have happened since January that have led me on the path to where I am in my faith as I write you this letter. It began with the simple act of picking up the pen and writing. I love writing, and have always loved it, but I abandoned it many years ago. I was not good enough to write, I told myself. I convinced myself - "You'll never be a writer." So naturally, I stopped. Even though I lived with contentment and purpose in my life - my children, my husband, my family - I still felt so, purposeless. As I began to write, I felt a calling - to return to the blank page, day after day. And so I did. I wrote my anger and my pain and my nothingness off my soul and I saw myself, honest there on the page, and instead of fearing it, or hating it - I held it. Loved it like my own child. I have since realized, and just in the last few weeks, that it was God, holding me. It was God - calling me back. "Come to the blank page and I will help you fill it up." Now, I am listening. I am answering my calling and doing so with an open heart. And I feel an overwhelming need to share it. Not just my writing, but just my honest soul. My blank page today was calling your name, and my need to tell you about the power of your sermon.

In your sermon a few weeks ago, you talked about how the sister of the girl who first brought you to God was in the congregation that day. You explained how you were, at a young age, on a path towards Buddhism and that Christianity merely lined your fascination with all the other world religions. But then you talked about your first real experience with Christianity, and that afterwards you called up this girl - the only girl you really knew who was a born-again Christian and who truly loved God with all her heart - and how she challenged you and encouraged you to read the Bible and wait for your heart to open. As you described how you took that trip up to Chicago, cracked open your Bible, waited for a miracle, and tried to force tears for dramatic effect - I laughed out loud, thinking, "Yes, that's how God calls people, right? Performs a grand miracle and booms His Voice from the clouds and then people fall over and they become saved and love the Lord, right?" I was never sure what "God's calling" would be like, but it never seemed like to could happen in the way it happened to you - sitting in a hotel room, reading the Bible, sliding it on your nightstand, and waking up just feeling a little different. That didn't sound all that spiritually gripping. God didn't part the heavens on the day you were saved. But here you stood, a man whose love for God was so evident in the way you move and the way you speak and the joy you bring to those around you. As you spoke, it hit me, "God can speak to us in the smallest of ways. I must just listen. I must just be willing to soften my heart, enough to let it crack just the slightest bit open."

You also explained how we can serve God in so many ways. We can be active in the church, sure, but we can serve God by doing His work cheerfully, with enthusiasm, with love in our hearts. When you said these words, I thought, "I can write. I can be a writer. Maybe I am not meant to be a Christian writer. But I am meant to write and God is calling me to do so, and I am not ashamed to say that. I can write that as my Truth and do so with passion and enthusiasm. And in knowing what my Truth is, and by living my Truth, I am serving God." I felt like you - by saying that to me - gave me permission to just answer my calling and to do so with love in my heart. I felt, free. Free to answer my calling, simple as writing may be, and know that I am doing what I am meant to do. For so long, I've felt like I needed to volunteer in my community, to be a mentor somehow - but these things did not fill my primal soul. That I can only do by listening to God and by writing what is in my honest heart. I have so, so far to go in my faith, but my heart has been cracked open just the slightest bit, and I am letting in His light.

Thank you, John, for just being an example for me. We have literally only spoken a few times. I have only attended Southside a handful of times. But I will remember that I found God in Springfield, Illinois, and that you were His disciple, inviting me like a friend to join His table. For the first time, I can pray to the Lord, and I will pray for you as you have - without even knowing - prayed for me.

With sincere gratitude,

Stacey Grant

Left to Wonder

There's light easy pleasure left to simple words sitting in grocery cart parking lots, and sleeping children and I wonder if you feel it with me.

There's symmetry of unnoticed curiosity looking up to that four corner lightpost, off until dusk and I wonder if you see it with me.

There's slightly different something perfect in every slow song radio note, background to listening thoughts and I wonder if you hear it with me.

There's that which becomes so nearly captured shy in this, one, word that is so finely close, but never quite and I wonder if you speak it with me.

Why we turn ourselves away to not meet the real eye of each other,
her walking or him standing, all of us looking about us alone or moving together talking yet still missing what it means to really listen to steps inside each others' footprints giving way to passing moments and every time losing just a little something,

Lost intrigue tells our story always simple in moments when we sit small and speechless, everything vulnerable, but never each or all of us at once and I'm left just wondering if you might meet me, here - where I am, and understand.

Here we go again

Knock-knock. Pulling up the covers.

KNOCK.
KNOCK.

Wut.
Who's there?

Voooor-AAAA-cious!

Voracious who-
Whoa what Hey how'd you even get-

The door? was unlocked?
Gotta check that.

No seriously you left me dancing Immaculately
Collected all by myself two in the morning and-

What's this?

You brought three morning shots of Red Bull? For me?
It's not even nine.

Did you drink yours al-?
Oh.
Right. Whoop-dee-do.

Shit-eatin' grin.

Just turn off the light, will ya?
Not that one,
Tha-at one. Yes.

Fine.
Hold the vodka.

Yes, I mean no.
Yes really--No.
Long story.

Here let me at least get up and pee first
Yes, yes, here we go.
Shaky-shaky blah blah -
Get my dancing shoes.

They're under the computer.