Living thankfully

Actually there is no other way to live. The alternative – trying to live thanklessly – has an ugly outcome (Romans 1:21f). It leads to death of the soul. A living death.

I said, “What a glorious day!”

She muttered, “It’s about time.” She was looking back at what she thought wasn’t good, and was still caught up in grumbling about that even though a warm sun was smiling through cuddly clouds.

So I tried again. “What a glorious day!”

“It won’t last,” he growled. He was looking ahead, anticipating what on his grid wouldn’t rate as good, even though the birds twittered and the flowers danced.

It’s tough to live thankfully if I keep looking either back or forward with jaundiced eyes. To complain about what was and fret about what might yet be, will keep me from living joyfully in this present gifted moment of my life. To live thankfully today, I will need to be tuned in to today, open to receive the gifts this moment is offering me. To miss that, is a tragedy. Letting life slip by.

Right here

But even if I am plugged in to the present, living thankfully depends on what I look for in this moment. I can use my metal detector to pick up the lifeless grumbleable stuff – the annoyances, the discomforts, the wishes denied. If I grumble, it is of course because I truly think things ought not to be the way they are. And I assure myself that if they were the way I’d like them to be, I would live thankfully, no sweat.

So I may require cataract surgery to remove the obstruction that keeps me from seeing the lovely things right here in the palm of my hand. Or perhaps I’ll need lens replacement to be able to envision a decade or more from now the fruit that can come from the unhappy things of the present.

“So, Lord God, Shepherd of Your little ones, I promise to live as present in the present as You are, as engaged in the moment as You are, as trusting in its flow as you are. I promise to rejoice in the wonder of Your love, active here and now, and in the present pain I promise to trust Your hand which shapes the outcome. And, yes, I will choose to live thankfully.”

Back and ahead

But I have a problem. Living in the present is only half the truth. I cannot keep from looking back and ahead; that is a remarkable innate human capacity.

I can try to avoid doing so if my past is too clogged with regrets and my future too charged with fear. I can cocoon myself in myself through voluntary blindness. I can allow myself to be mindlessly swallowed up by the present. A kind of living death.

To live freely and thankfully in the present, I must both honour and be free of my past and my future.

So how do I look at my past in a way that enables me to live thankfully in the present moment? There is a remembering that serves as an escape from the present. Nothing right now inspires thanks, so I escape to the past where life was more to my liking. God seemed to be kinder then, and I had a place of importance. But disengaging from where I am at the moment is also a kind of living death.

There is a wholesome remembering that is rooted in faith. Even when at the moment life is unpleasant, I believe that what God does is right. After all, He proved righteous in my own past, and has always done so in all generations. Such remembering helps me to wait for God now, and in that waiting, I am thankful.

In that same faith I can look ahead to what will be, or might be. Nothing can ever happen that will be outside of God’s righteous intent. And so I can be at peace in the present, whether this present smells of roses or of decay.

Over and above

There is this poignant moment in the gospel story: In that last supper event Jesus knows the momentous happenings just ahead. Yet He gives thanks for the ordinary, for the bread that will sustain Him in the next trying hours. How amazing! To give thanks for the ordinary on the threshold of life-shattering horror to come. Like the family pausing to thank God for the water they are about to drink, when annihilation stares them in the face.

Here is the Spirit’s instruction according to Ephesians 5:20: “Over and above everything, give thanks as you speak the name of the Lord Jesus, the Christ.”

So, if I can’t say thanks yet for the present pain or disappointment, I can say thanks over and above it. I can speak the name that is above every name, above everything, above every moment, every event, every joy, every success, every disaster, every catastrophe. Everything, absolutely everything, is in good hands. And I am thankful.

John Regehr taught at Mennonite Brethren Bible College, Winnipeg, until his retirement and then worked, with his wife Mary, at Recovery of Hope counselling centre. He attends McIvor Ave. MB Church, Winnipeg.