T.S. Tuesday: More Than Enough

I’m back to reading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. So today is my Voskamp/Eliot mashup, if such a thing is possible.

I huddle in my sheets, drinking my coffee as I read,

“I awake to I AM here. When I’m present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still…and holy.

Here is the only place I can love Him.”

When I say,

          I don’t want this day

          I don’t want this moment

          I don’t want these tasks or this conversation or this job

I am saying, I don’t want this God.

This I AM that is present in the moment. That is Himself the present tense.

I start. I flinch. My coffee jolts.

Is that what I’m saying?

When I reject the present, I reject the I AM.

The I AM in the moment.

He is present in every one. In every moment.

My very breath proof of His presence.

I flash to Eliot, a phrase from Burnt Norton that caught my heart many years ago: “Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs.”

I am the unwholesome and He is the wind. In and out. In and out. In the rhythm of I AM.

All day I try to embrace the moment. I really try. I write notecard reminders. I consecrate my desk and my space and my tasks.

Dissatisfaction oozes in.

They can’t occupy the same space: gratitude and discontent.

I can only see the NOT ENOUGH.

Ann has a cure for this too.

She recounts the story of Jesus feeding the masses with the not enough of loaves and fishes. A phrase jumps out to her, this woman “sleuthing for glory.” She sees right there in the text that before the miracle, before the full bellies, before the multiplication of the not enough, HE GAVE THANKS.

She writes,

“Gave thanks…I’d missed it and all of my life?

I’d never considered those two words, the bridge words there in the middle, the crossing over that took the not enough and made it enough.”

Gave thanks.

Counted gifts.

Stacked joy.

But, I protest, I can’t give thanks until I know what the future holds. Thankfulness is bondage to complacency. Saying things are okay right now ensures certain paralysis, right?

I am born to move and grow and learn and leave. Where does thanks fit in?

I don’t give thanks because I feel this moment, this circumstance, is not enough.

But wait. Isn’t that what Ann just said?  The moment of not enough is precisely when Jesus gives thanks.

“Jesus embraces his not enough…He gives thanks…And there is more than enough.”

Later that day I am at the beach. Saved by daylight savings and one more hour of sun and surf and life. I run, I splash, sand wedges its stubborn way into my shoes. Children erupt in squeals of cold and glee, emerging from the emerald waves with strands of shimmering seaweed. 

I reach a doggy beach painted with doggy paw prints with doggy yips and doggy paddles under a piercing blue sky of endless doggy summer. I stop my body, but my breath pants on, the wind in and out of unwholesome lungs.

And at last I gasp, give thanks, “It is more than enough.”

I am born to move and grow and learn and leave. This gratitude in motion is second nature. It's the sedentary thankfulness that will require more discipline.

Today I write more notecards. I consecrate my desk and space and time once again. Calm in my-not-so-ergonomically-designed desk chair, I force myself to notice my quiet breaths: wind in and out of unwholesome lungs.

And give thanks, waiting for the more than enough. 

A Better Answer

This is a follow up to yesterday's blog post, Solidaridad, which I suggest reading first. 

***

"I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world." from Ann Voskamp’s masterpiece, One Thousand Gifts

This, this is the better answer to my haunting question: What does it mean to live in solidarity with poor?


“Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering.” 


How I wish someone had whispered this truth to me when I first opened my crowded closet; when I first swiped my ATM card for apricot face scrub and a new roll of floss at Target; when I first felt the summer sun warm up my parent’s patriotic front yard.

"It is joy that saves us..."

How I wish our study abroad discussions around solidarity had ventured beyond fair trade shopping and SUV bashing and into the fine art of learning to love our neighbors—poor or 1% or anywhere in between.


"Why would the world need more anger, more outrage?"

I mean, how are we supposed to love the poor if we don’t love ourselves? What kind of improved quality of life are we lobbying for if we can’t even recognize the God-like qualities in our suburban Christian friends?


I learned this lesson the hard way. Floundering and seething in an anger that quickly wore out its welcome.  In an anger that helped neither the poor nor the poor saps around me.

My first real step toward living in solidarity with the poor (on which I still have an immensely long way to go) was when I started to live in solidarity with myself. When I started to live in solidarity with my immediate neighbors. When I started to think that I was worth loving and that, maybe, the people in front of me—my Whole Foods Shopping, Invisible Children v-neck wearing peeps and my less well-versed in the rhetoric and fashion requirements of social justice friends and family alike—were worth loving too.

Solidarity began when I asked myself, like Ann Voskamp, Where can I bring life? Where can I choose hope?

How can I become the brave soul who focuses “on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small?” Where can I “discover joy even in the here and now?”

The surprising answer to the solidarity question is this: joy.

And in that joy comes a valuing of all human life and all of Creation, a heart that hopes, eyes that see the gifts, and lips that praise the Gifter.  This is the foundation of solidarity. This is the seed that blooms the hope to sustain a multitude of change agents bringing fullest Light to all the world.

Who wants to live the better answer?

***

P.S. I am still stubbornly passionate (although no longer belligerent) about reducing my injustice footprint and learning to live and act in ways that serve, support, and empower the poor.  I would love to talk shop with anyone interested in living more justly, sustainably, and joyfully.

But how, you ask?

You can read more of my thoughts in my post on fighting both first world apathy and third world poverty or dive into 7 Practical Tips (and delicious writing) from Jen Hatmaker, author of  "7 : An Experimental Mutiny AgainstExcess."  Or check out Julie Clawson’s fabulous book, EverydayJustice. Or find out more about my favorite poverty alleviation non profit that I just so happen to work for: Plant With Purpose. 

Stacking Up Joy

Psalm 73:23

Yet I am always with you;

you hold me by my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will take me into glory.

I knew God was going to speak.

I knew he had a message. A promise. An image.

And sure enough, he did.

"Someone is running in the dark, past all of these closed doors. But God rushes in and takes your hand; suddenly you are running with him in the light—free," she said.

I knew the image was for me.

I know the light has been promised. The joy will be forthcoming. The twirls and running and sensation of grass springing beneath my toes will be a reality.

I don't doubt it.

But I can't feel it. Right now--even after prayer upon prayer--I don't feel the joy and I can't see the light. Not yet.

But I don't doubt it.

The one thing I know is that I won't fake it. There is a time when I would have faked it, so hard it would almost tear me apart.

But today I will not fake it. The God who promises me light is smart enough to know that I'm not there yet. He's patient enough to give me the grace to grapple. To say, God I don't feel this joy that you talk about. I trust it is coming. I pray for the strength to ask for it.

I feel it fragments. In moments. In glimpses and hand squeezes and heads bowed and tears pricking.

But this picture of overwhelming light and sun and freedom--I don't feel it yet.

I love the image of stacking up truths. I like the idea of the addition, the stacking, the summation of experiences and truths and ideas.

But lately I've been challenged on this mindset. For what good is truth without love or joy?

I could stack up sad, pathetic truths for days.

1. The world is a place of deep pain and intolerable suffering.

2. God doesn’t always answer prayer.

3. People I love get sick, trapped in destructive patterns, move away, move out of my life.

4. I can't seem to get ahead of this curve of depression and burnout.

…..Etc. etc. until I can't get out of bed.

But where does this get me?

This keeps me in the dark, sprinting, heaving past closed doors.

There is another truth I can choose to see: the light wins.

God grabs my hand and sets me free.

Will I build my life around the darkness or will I build my life around the joy?

In One Thousand Gifts Ann Voskamp writes, "Do not disdain the small. The whole of life - even the hard - is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole ... There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments add up."

The moments add up.

The joy adds up.

I want a life stacked on joy.

God, I ask for the courage and discipline to choose to see the good. To unclench my fearful fists so you can take my hand.

Even in the darkness--in the not yet--I can stack these moments. I will stack the little joy and I will build my life on your promises:

Aly, you will grow. I will comfort you. I will restore your joy. I love you.

I thank you for the glimpses. The fragments. That which I see in part that will one day be given to me in whole.

I thank you God for the hope of most this amazing joy. Please guide me with your counsel and take me to your glory. Amen.