We all know we should count our blessings, but all too often it is just so much easier to count our miseries. Somehow, that just seems to come much more naturally. And miseries seem to capture my thoughts and interrupt my days so much more readily than blessings [and maybe yours as well]. Just tonight as I was hoping to escape for an hour or two to "write my annual Thanksgiving devotional for tomorrow's big dinner gathering" our two basin kitchen sink holding our 27 lb. turkey surrounded by gallons of water as it thaws collapsed as the adhesive bonding it to our granite countertop failed spilling countless gallons of water under the bar, onto the floor flowing both toward the kitchen table as well as the center island. So instead of having more time to ponder my blessings I had an all new and fresh reason to grumble. So many days of the year seem to go just like this. But then I realized once again that counting my miseries really just shrinks my soul, and in the end I end up more miserable than when I began.
A Pilgrim's Perspective
For years [until I started writing this blog] I pictured the first Thanksgiving as the Pilgrims' joyful celebration of a bountiful harvest, sharing with the indigenous people God's abundant provision in a fertile new land. But celebrating that first Thanksgiving was a veritable act of faith and sober worship, not a natural response to prosperity and abundance.In the fall of 1620, the Mayflower set sail for Virginia with 102 passengers on board. On December 16, they landed in Massachusetts, far north of their intended destination, just as winter was setting in. This northern climate was much harsher than Virginia's, and the settlers were unprepared for the cold season ahead. Winter brought bitter temperatures and rampant sickness. Shelter was rudimentary at best. Food was scarce. People lay dying all around.
That winter, all but three families dug graves in the hard, frozen New England soil to bury a husband, wife or child. By the spring of 1621, half of the Pilgrims had died from disease, exposure or starvation. Virtually no one was untouched by tragedy.
The Pilgrims and Israelites chose to be grateful for what they had, rather than to focus on all they had lost. They had to look for blessings. Actively and deliberately. Their thanksgiving was not based on pleasant circumstances, but rather on the understanding that God was to be thanked in both prosperity and adversity. Their gratitude was not a "positive thinking" facade, but a deep and steadfast trust that God was guiding all their circumstances, even when life was beyond difficult. Viewing their lives through a lens of gratitude changed their perspective.
I have found that viewing life through a lens of gratitude can change my perspective on just about everything. Yet it always comes down to a choice of which lens I will use today ... or even multiple times throughout the day.
I think we all know someone who excels in the art of photography. I think of the old Christmas Ideals magazines I used to look through repeatedly each holiday season ... somehow those fabulous photos truly captured the "ideal" of Christmas for me as a young boy. Or how about those amazing photographers at Life magazine back in the day? They seemed to so precisely capture the essence of life back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Or even the famous black and white photographer Ansel Adams who so fabulously brought the essence of the American west to life in the simplest but most profound pictures of just a tree or a stream or a mountain or a range of mountains. He had a gift. But even closer to home my daughters Alli and especially Ariel have a similar gifting. They see things that I would never notice or maybe it would be even more accurate to say that they "see things in things that I would never notice." We can all drive by an old, faded barn and see a dilapidated building in need of paint [or in my case of even needing to be torn down], but they may see a beautifully weathered structure with great character, focusing on unique angles and lines, finding intricate details that don't even register with me. They have a unique gift to look past the obvious and relish the small things. One of the most amazing cases in point for this was shortly before Ariel went off to college at FSU and moved into her dorm room we were driving down Bronough Street and Ariel screamed out "stop the car!" She had seen an almost finished up Saturday yard sale with a beat up, scarred old literal "ice box" in the yard. And she started pleading with me to buy it for her. Of course I implored "What on earth for? How can you possibly need an old ice box taking up space in your cramped dorm room?" Because I saw literally a banged up nearly 100 year old "ice box" that many years ago had served to keep things cool. "But now we have electricity Ariel ... even in Dorman" [her old dorm long since razed to the ground]. "I've already bought you a mini-refrigerator." Yet, she saw it as a BOOKCASE and so it was for many years and it even followed her into her first, second and maybe even third apartment as a young married woman! She could see things I could not ... mostly because of what she chose to focus her lens on.
In the same way, how we view our own lives depends mostly on what we choose to focus on. From some angles they can look like complete messes. But from other vantages, they can be perfectly beautiful. Our perspectives truly depend on where we focus our lenses.
Fifteen and a half years ago in the middle of the construction of this house [on June 22, 2003 to be exact] I accidentally pulled 1320 pounds of drywall over onto my left lower leg essentially crushing it. The pain was both immediate and unbelievably intense ... by far, the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life. It literally felt as if my foot had been ripped from my leg, which it turned out is actually what had happened once the drywall could be lifted off my leg by the firemen and paramedics. But between the constant pain of this would come incredible paroxysms of burning pain that I could only describe as if a six inch diameter steel rod had been heated up to 2000 degrees and then jammed up through my heel into my ankle and finally up through my lower leg to just below my knee in a recurring manner lasting between 5 and 15 seconds and occurring roughly every 1 to 2 minutes.
Eventually before I could be transported to the hospital, after I had been "hog-tied" to the backboard, the paramedics had to "set" my foot which was six inches away from my lower leg and facing backwards. The agony of that moment was indescribable and afterwards, at best, my foot was still 30 degrees out of proper alignment. God had my full attention now. It is sad that it took this for God to be able to speak to me about my need for brokenness. Up until that moment it had been a theological concept that I was very intrigued by but one that I wasn't completely willing to choose for myself. Ultimately, God chose it for me and I was and still am in many ways so much the better for it. Little did I know then that as I wrote the story of my miracle week of brokenness that He would end up using that story to provide divine healings from terminal breast cancer, drug addictions, other cancers, lives on the skids, etc. ... the story was shared at the Southern Baptist National Convention that summer, was published in our university's alumni magazine, etc. I received e-mails literally from all over the world describing the myriad ways that God had used that story to change the lives of people from Australia to Europe and literally from all fifty states. What seemed like a shipwreck of my life that could very easily and in reality in all probability should have cost me my foot and ankle led many to Christ, myself included, in ways I could have never imagined. The sacrifice of that "light and momentary affliction" as Paul called it in 2 Corinthians 4:17 "prepares for us an eternal weight of glory" that far outweighs what we may have suffered for his sake.
Or consider five years later in the spring of 2008 coinciding exactly with the weekend when I was, unbeknownst to me at the time, selected for elder in my church [Four Oaks Community Church] that I experienced the sudden onset of perilous and malignant hypertension [blood pressures running in the 220/120 mm Hg range], intensely severe and crushing daily migraine headaches, the sudden paralysis of my left sixth cranial nerve resulting in drastic double vision when looking to my left [not to mention my eyes looking all "googly-eyed" as Janna called it for the next 6-9 months], the complete and permanent disappearance of my thyroid gland [to the point that the ultrasonographer looking for it asked if I had had it removed ... there was, of course, no surgical scar on my neck]. This all coincided with a Bible study I was leading for my community group through the book of Philippians and we had just finished my very favorite passage in Scripture ... chapter 3 vv. 7-14 which would become overtly real and personal to me over the next nine months, and in fact, became the very namesake for this blog [v. 14] nine years ago.
But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ -- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Ultimately, God restored my vision slowly over three months after the diplopia had persisted unabated for six full months. My blood pressure came under control with the aid of three ongoing medications. My thyroid gland never returned and I require chronic full daily thyroid supplementation. Thankfully after nine hours in two different MRI machines over the course of two weeks no dreadful cause of my left sixth nerve palsy was ever found ... as the "six syndromes of the sixth cranial nerve" are all harrowing and all but one is fatal and MS [multiple sclerosis] can itself be fatal in some cases. No explainable medical cause was found for any of this. My neuro-ophthalmologist and my neurosurgeon both favored an autoimmune cause [though every test of autoimmunity known to medicine was negative] while I attributed it to demonic activity corresponding to my ascension to the eldership [they said it couldn't be that "because there is no such thing as that" ... I told them it took more faith to believe their autoimmune theory than it did my demonic theory]. All I know is that I have never felt closer to Christ than during the times when I've "shared in the fellowship of his sufferings" and it is only at those times that I have felt the closest to his resurrection power.
So as I reflect back on the path that my life has taken over the past fifteen years, I know that I would have never chosen to take this path myself, and from certain angles, my life has at times looked very bleak. In fact, one of my community group members remarked as he watched my struggles with headaches and double vision that he didn't think that it was worth it. He could not have been more wrong! From the angles that I have chosen to view my life, I see it as beautiful. I have seen God use me in incredibly powerful ways that I could have never done and would not have done on my own. He has blessed me with an incredibly wonderful and faithful wife of almost 36 years; four fabulous and brilliant children who all love and serve God; three amazing sons-in-law who also love and serve God ... one full-time vocationally! I have been blessed with SIX amazing grandchildren with two more on the way. I have a son who is pursuing medicine vocationally and a son-in-law who has chosen to do the same. I like to think that they have chosen to follow in my footsteps [whether they have or not is beside the point in my mind]. Two of my daughters chose nursing to be their vocation. So from a family where the healing arts are just about completely foreign comes a team of healers! God has been so incredibly faithful and good. I am excited about the future which looks incredibly bright, though none of us knows for certain what exactly it holds. What we do know though, is that if we are in Christ then we know the One who holds it and for that assurance we can all be thankful.
