Now, Voyager

"I do not know what the future will bring, but it cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past."

Ashley Wilkes says that, in Gone With the Wind, in a letter he writes to Melanie (his wife) while he's fighting in the Civil War. He's remembering lazy and carefree barbecues on giant, successful plantations with money flowing out his ears.

I had meticulously copied that sentence in my journal as a 15-year-old and sighed in longing agreement.

Because apparently, at the ripe old age of 15, I had lived so much life as to have built many of my own plantations I could enviously look back on, discontented with the world-weary life I now lived.

It seems that, no matter where we are in life, there is always something to look back on enviously. We compare where we are now with where we were then, and somehow "then" is always shrouded in this pleasant, hazy glow, like dream sequences from 90s sitcoms.

However, if you were to travel with the Ghost of Christmas Past into an actual scene from your past and peek in the windows on yourself in your living room, you would probably find yourself fretting over something, or discontented with something, or complaining about something. You'd remember how, even though you had a job you loved, you couldn't afford to save money or buy socks. You'd remember how, even though you had such close friends around you, you were far from family and sad to miss time with them. You'd remember how, even though you lived in a city that felt like home, you were too stressed out most of the time to enjoy it.

"So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we must decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Gandalf says that, in The Lord of the Rings, after Frodo says he wishes that the Ring had never come to him and that none of this had ever happened.

It's one of those quotes that people post on Pinterest on very spiritual backgrounds that they think will inspire them to live different lives. Instead, they just forget about it as soon as it's their turn at the Starbucks drive-thru window.

Not that I have done this.

Don't Pinterest and drive.

(This is my own personalized one. You may have it. As your phone background, maybe.)

I recently met with a woman who, when laid off from work several years ago, decided to use her new-found free time to volunteer with several organizations around town. After doing so, she saw a gap in the programs available and decided to found a new organization specifically geared toward mentoring middle school and high school girls. Now she's retired and leads this nonprofit that serves girls all over the county.

Looks like she didn't sit around on her bumpkin pining for the past, did she? Talk about deciding what to do with the time that is given to you.

I think Ashley Wilkes was right that nothing will be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past, but not because the past is better than the present. It's because the past has already happened and we don't have to work at it anymore. We can simply enjoy the good memories of it and the good fruits from it and not remember how there was still buying milk and there was still loneliness and there were still crises that we weeded through and things we wished for.

The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

Walt Whitman says that, in his book of poems, Leaves of Grass. I like it because he is saying that sometimes it isn't placed in our laps, and sometimes we must be adventurers and go find it.

Not necessarily to be ambitious, big-dreaming world-changers who stand on stages and whose names everybody knows, but to be common people who are grateful in the day-to-day, to use both our busy and our not-busy time wisely, to find joy amidst buying milk, to invest what we have (which means being aware of what we have), and not to wait for our lives to work themselves out for our enjoyment but to intentionally make life happen. To give of ourselves and make good use of the time we have and be present.

So that's my little speech to myself. That I'm sharing with you so that I am without excuse to remain stagnant any longer.

Magnificat

My little niece Annabelle and I sat in her living room, playing with her new Legos. They were zoo Legos, with a monkey and a bird and a lion. I kept building flowers and putting them in different places in the zoo and she kept taking them apart and telling me that that's not where they go.

Well, at least she has vision.

After a few minutes of playing, Annabelle grabbed the empty Lego box and set it in front of her, sighing over the pictures of all the other Lego sets she didn't have. 

"I wish I had these," she said, resting her little chin on her little hand and scanning all the pictures with her big blue eyes.

"But you have these," I countered, building another illegal flower and sneaking it behind one of the zoo trees.

"I know," she said, still scanning jealously, "but I don't have these."

"Well some little girls don't have any of them--"

She looked up at me with wide eyes. 

"--so maybe we could be grateful for what we do have?"

She spotted my flower and plucked it from its spot (I thought I had hidden it so well!) and told me that she was trying to be nice and didn't want to hurt my feelings, but that's not where the flowers go.

I sat back as she reorganized her zoo and wondered why we all can't just be thankful for what we have.

When I think about being thankful, my mind automatically meanders through all of the ways I've been told to cultivate thankfulness throughout the years. Like taking 15-minute prayer walks every day to tell God what you're thankful for, or making lists every day of the things you're thankful for, or reading that book 1,000 Gifts where the author sounds very poetic but in the end I don't really understand half the stuff she's talking about.

Recently I have been thinking that thankfulness must be more than just an ability to see how much you have. Because what if you lose it all? Or what if you really don't have that much? Or what if you know how much you have, but you still feel discontented?

Thankfulness must mean something more than that. Thankfulness must be something deeper. Soul-deep.

"I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the LORD." - Psalm 116:17

Here is this verse that I have been growing to love, because in this verse, David gets it. He gets that we are all greedy little discontented beings, the whole lot of us, and because it is our human nature to always want more, to be thankful is a sacrifice.

A sacrifice is usually something that doesn't come easily to us; something that costs us something. We sacrifice our time through volunteering or helping our neighbors move or babysitting for free. We sacrifice our money by donating or tithing or picking up the tab at lunch. Sacrifice usually means doing something when we would rather do something else.

In Luke 1, Mary is told that she will give birth to the Messiah.

Hello.

If there is anything that will pile heaps and heaps of life-long responsibility onto your shoulders and require an entire mindset shift and break your heart with the agony that is to come, it's being the mother of the Lamb who will be slaughtered and save the world through the shedding of His blood.

But here is Mary's response:

"And Mary said, 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.'" - Luke 1:46-47

Mary offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving. And her thanksgiving is not a list of what she has, but a list of who God is.

She delights in God Himself.

This is what I have been missing.

I try to counter my list of the things that are going wrong with a list of the things that are going right, but the reassurance that that offers will never last me very long. What I need is God Himself.

"When you come to any promise or any other part of Scripture, look at it and through it to God Himself who makes the promise, before it applies to you. And let yourself see Him, dwell on Him, the God behind these promises. Let yourself linger with this God." - John Piper

I do think it's important to be aware of how much you have been given. The blessings of health or warmth or safety or family or income or a new car or your favorite food or a good job or good friends. It's important to see what good things we have in our lives and not take them for granted.

However, I think the sacrifice of thanksgiving becomes joy to us when we delight more in who God is than in what He gives. Because thanksgiving is what brings us into the presence of God (Psalm 95:2), and in God's presence there is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11).

And I want to get much better at that type of thanksgiving.

morning promises

My alarm woke me up this morning to Will Reagan & United Pursuit. I am naturally a morning person, so smiling when I wake up is not unusual for me. My first thought is usually, "I LOVE MORNING!" (Not an exaggeration.) But my first thought this morning was a little different.

One of my favorite promises that God has been fulfilling in my life recently is that He is all I need.

Sometimes I start to look at who's getting married, who's having kids, who's making more money than I am, who's driving a better car than I am, who has family living near to them, etc. And I wonder at God, "Why haven't You blessed me with all of these things?" And I feel discouraged and discontented and a little sad, like maybe there's something wrong with me or that I'm not as "treasured" or "valued" or "deserving" as someone else.

And once I've thought these thoughts, I've taken my eyes off Jesus.

Because here's the thing about Jesus: He gives.

I'm not talking about the Pollyanna "glad game" where you make a list of all the blessings you have been given (which is a very good thing to do).

I am talking about finding everything and all in the One whose love and grace goes deeper and fuller than any person or thing ever could.

He gives us Himself.

There are a lot of things I want, and a lot of things I don't understand why I don't have. But here is where that Will Reagan & United Pursuit song comes in:

I take all those things that tell me I am incomplete, that tell me I am not where I could be or should be, that tell me there's more that I could have, and lay them at Jesus' feet and pray,

If I give it all to You, will You make it all new?

Because He does. He has. He continues to take what I give Him and make it into something I would not have designed for myself. Sometimes that means giving Him something I really want and telling Him that I trust that whatever He gives will be better.

And it is.

Because when He gives you Himself, it is far better assurance that you are treasured and valued than if He were to give you every blessing on earth.

I do not comfort myself in my "losses" but counting all the blessings He has given me. I allow Him to comfort me and show me that there is no loss when I find everything I need in Him.

"The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy." - Psalm 11:7