40 to 40 (Gratitude 1)

(If you don't know what "40 to 40" is, click the graphic.)

My first gratitude was easy to come by. I am thankful for my grandmother Brooke. Her name was Clara Louise Brooke. I was named for her -- Amy Louise. I love that fact.

My childhood was fairly tumultuous. My grandmother was an oasis in the midst of it. I use to will myself to wake up early and tip toe down the stairs. I would sit in the green chair where she could see me when she looked out the door from her bed. She would always get up and start making breakfast. While she made coffee cake or fried bacon I would prattle on and on about everything imaginable. I was not a talker as a child, but when I was with her I talked. She heard all about school and listened to poems I had memorized or ones that I had made up. She knew I wanted to grow up and study dolphins.

I hated it when everyone else woke up and I had to share her. But I am so grateful for those morning times I had with her. She made me feel listened to. She made me feel cared about. More than anything, she made me feel loved.

Expectations

We are already beginning to get a bit of Christmas traffic at the book store. We have Halloween and a Thanksgiving display out and are quite ready to put out the Christmas stuff. We've had calenders for 2009 for several months.

All this getting ready for Christmas reminded me of a conversation I overheard last year between two men. The first announced happily that he had received a $300 bonus from his company. The second man was less enthusiastic. He said, "Well, you want to know what I got? A $25 gift card. Enjoy yours . . . ." Actually, he pretty much slammed whomever gave him that gift card.

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Why 40 to 40?

In 41 days I will turn 40. You know the BIG deal 40. Okay, I suppose for some people a different age is the one that pushes the edge, but turning 40 makes me nervous. The problem is that I think it makes me nervous for all the wrong reasons. It makes nervous that I'm not married or even dating anyone. It makes me nervous that I don't have children. It makes me nervous that I still sometimes wonder what I am going to be when I grow up.

Mostly, it makes me nervous because I trust God so little and instead of seeing what He has given me, I only see what I don't have.

Forty is a big Biblical number. It rained 40 days and 40 nights. The people of Israel wandered 40 years. Elijah ran for 40 days in the wilderness to a mountain cave where He heard God speak in a whisper. Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness for 40 days but then Mark tells us the angels attended Him.

So, a lot of things happen around 40. Some of it bad like wandering as a punishment but other good things like hearing God in a whisper. I want to mark my 40 years in a positive way. I want to practice the attitude of gratitude.

Simply put, for the next 40 days there will be at least one post a day that is simply something I am grateful for. It could be a person, a thing, a event, a positive comment someone made. Maybe it is a happy story from when I was a child. Whatever it is, it has to be positive.

I think it will be interesting to come up with 40 positives about my 40 years. So if you see a post marked "40 to 40 (35)" that means it is a 40 to 40 post and is gratitude number 35. They say it takes 30 days to change a habit. Pessimism has probably marked my first 40 years. I'd love to see that change to optimism and gratitude for the next 40 years.

Anyone want to join my 40 to 40 club? You don't have to be turning 40. Rather you may just want to practice gratitude for 40 days. If you do, leave a comment below. I'd love ot have some company on this trip. It will all start tomorrow!

If you join the 40 to 40 club or not, please pray for me when you see one of these posts. Pray that it will be more than a head exercise. Pray that it will be an exercise and conditioning of my heart.




PS: Yes, this is about being grateful for what I have. But I also want to be honest. My heart longs for a husband and kids. I struggle with the idea of singleness being a gift. I often hear of people praying for their child's spouse but rarely (if ever) do I hear them say that they are praying their child would remain single.

Here is my going out on a limb even as I start 40 to 40. Would all of you who pray for your child's spouse pray for my spouse as well? Having asked for that, I'm off to be grateful for what God has done the last 40 years.

Accepted, Flaws and All -- Hope Chronicles 76

Yes, it is Tuesday and that means it's book day at Lelia's. First, though, I must apologize for wigging out on it last week. Honestly, I read it but didn't have time to do much more than come home, feed the cats, go to my second job, sleep, and do it all over again the next day. That's my excuse, but I've got time tonight.

Flaws. I've got them. I'm heavier than I would like to be. I struggle with depression. I can be snappish and mean at times. I get caught up in everything going on with me. You get the picture. There are a few things that might make me seem a bit unloveable and definitely unacceptable.

Lisa writes, "The depth of God's love for us is hard to comprehend. So are the height, the width, and the breadth of His love. our human minds will not allow us to process the greatness of the love of our Father because we are programmed by the world's view of love, which has great limitations." Limitations. Isn't that the truth? The world says, "I'll love you if . . . ." God says, "I'll love you in spite of . . . . I'll love you when you shine and I'll love you when you're down. I'll love you all the way around the world, to the moon and back again. I cannot love you less."

The truly amazing thing about God's love is that He does love in spite of. He knows all of my flaws and failures. J. I. Packer writes in Knowing God:

. . . There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on a prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.

God's love is utterly realistic. Because of that, I can find great comfort. God loves me in spite of knowing the worst about me.

But He also is always inviting me to grow.

The hard part, I think, is that in knowing this fact, God also expects me to try to love others in the same way. This is a growth point for me. Can I love you if you snub me? Can I love you when you hurt my feelings? Can I love you when you let me down?

Asking those questions are convicting. It makes me think of a couple of people at church I've kind of written off because I felt like the friendship was more important to me than to them. And they let me down one to many times. But maybe God is calling me to go back and love them, accept them, flaws and all.

And it that, I may pass on hope.

Appropriate Smallness

My small group is reading The Life You've always Wanted. It is by John Ortberg and it is worth reading. Today I was reading the chapter entitled "Appropriate Smallness." It starts out talking about 3 men in Ypsalanti, Michigan that were in a psychiatric hospital and all of them suffered from the Messiah complex. They each, even when confronted with each other, believed that they were the messiah. I had to chuckle at reading it. It's a classic story of delusions of grandeur that gets told to psychology students everywhere. I actually ran into someone with this belief while working in mental health. I was there simply to assess safety. Since he wasn't a danger to himself or others, there was no choice but to let him go on his way. I knew that confronting a delusion of this proportion would only agitate him. But I was sad to see that he took this as a sign that it was appropriate to ask me to be one of his followers and write scripture.

What is the chapter about? Pride. It points to the original sin of eating the forbidden fruit as pride because they ate it so they might become like God.

The chapter goes on to discuss one of my favorite chapters in scripture -- Philippians 2. Here it points out that we often get our theology confused. We read "Who, being in very nature god, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, . . . ." and see it as God shedding who he was and putting on a different costume.

From our perspective this makes sense. But, Ortberg argues that we've got it backwards. He writes, "Jesus became a servant inspite of the fact that he was God." Being God was the cause of his making himself nothing and taking on the nature of a servant.

"When Jesus came in the form of a servant, he was not disguising who God is. He was revealing who God is."

What a wondrous thought is that? Being a servant is part of the essence of being God.

On the eve of a Presidential election, it makes me wonder which of the canidates would be presdient so that he could serve? Which one would be president so that he could wash the bruised and calloused feet of the homeless man on the street? Which one would make decisions always with the interest of the least of these in the forefront of his mind?

I don't know. Honestly, I don't think many who have the gumption to run for president have the approproate smallness servanthood requires.

Of course, the question that also needs to be asked is if I have the appropriate smallness in my day to day life?

Worth Passing on Hope

I think that I have handled my first rejection reasonably well. Most of the time, I've kept it quite in perspective. The rejection email came from the agent I met with at She Speaks. While my writing is "admiral" I don't have a platform. In today's world of publishing, even if you write well, if you don't have a platform than you are counted as a "Nobody." He was kind enough not to say that, but . . . .

When I was a teenager, I went through an Emily Dickenson phase. She has a poem. I'm not sure of the title, but part of it goes,

How dreary to be somebody

How public like a frog

To tell your name the live long day

To an admiring bog

Honestly, I bought that as a teen. I found comfort in it. For in the world of high school I was a nobody. People rarely even talked to me unless it was to ask to copy my notes. I was invisible. But then I had been invisible all my life. This poem spoke from one invisible soul to another.

But I don't live in that invisible world any longer. I do want to be somebody. I am somebody. I am somebody to God. I'm somebody to Mark and Jill and Debbie and Joe and Austin and Kolya and Grace and Elena and . . . .

So, there is no solace in those words any longer. I know what it means to count as someone to others.

The difficulty is knowing where to go from here. The proposal is still in several different hands. But, who knows what they are thinking.

It just seems odd that you can write "admirably" but be turned down because you are a nobody, because you have no platform. Yes, I know that platform helps sell books. What good is a a book that clutters a bookstore's shelves?

But still, I think I have something to say. I am convinced I need to start working on it again. I need to write the whole thing. If it only gets to one person or to several people in bits and pieces here, I still need to write it. It's worth writing. It's worth passing on the hope.

My subtitle was "Finding hope in unlikely places." I thought it was good and clever. I recently discovered that Philip Yancey has a new book out. It's title is "Finding God In Unlikely Places." I suppose I need to change that subtitle since something so similar is being used. But it speaks so much to what Hope's Choice is about. I guess I didn't call dibs loud or long enough!

Compassion -- Hope Chronicles 75

The last few days at work have been tedious. Sales have been very slow. The store very quiet. I think I much prefer a little hustle and bustle to the place. I've found myself looking for projects that need to be done.

The other thing I have noticed the last couple of days is that everyone seems on edge for a variety of reasons. Someone doesn't feel well. Someone else had an argument with their wfe. Someone said they haven't been sleeping well. I'm not sure what the other reasons are, but it feels like a grumpy lot! By the end of the day, I find myself getting a little grumpy too.

There is one person in particular who rubs me the wrong way. It isn't one big thing. It's lots of little things like redoing something I've done because they don't like the way I did it or not responding to a "Good morning" and generally just being prickly.

I was complaining (not a great thing I know) once to Julie, my counselor, about someone awhile back. She said, "I've found that the people who grate on me the most are the ones I most need to have compassion on."

I've been thinking about it the last couple of hours. I think Julie is right. But what does it mean to have compassion on someone? I looked it up online at www.thefreedictionary.com. It said, "Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it." That was humbling to read.

I think it fits biblically. In the gospels, when Jesus feeds the 5,000 it says that he had compassion on them for they were like sheep without a shepherd. He understood their plight. He deeply desired to address it. In fact, that is why he came -- to be the Good Shepherd!

Questions for myself:

1. How can I be more aware of the suffering of those around me?
2. How can I cultivate a desire to relieve that suffering?
3. In what small ways can I daily demonstrate compassion?

Me in the background
with my younger sister
on my grandparents, farm in OH.

Laura Story has a song out called "Mighty to Save" that says, "Everyone needs compassion. A love that's never failing. Let mercy fall on me." When we demonstrate compassion, we give others hope. After Renee encouraged people to "Bless it Forward" I went into work with a new attitude, determined to bless the person I was struggling so much with. I sincerely complimented her three times. By the end of the evening, we were actually laughing together.