Gratitude and the Sovereignty of God

One of the curses of getting older is what I call "the retrospective obsession." This may be because we think the happiest years of our lives are found in the past. Or, to the contrary, we may be captive to injuries or violations that took place in the past, and we cannot or will not forget or forgive them. Sometimes, we are fixated on bad choices and violations we have ourselves perpetrated. Mark Twain, speaking of his own dark memories and the sleeplessness they entailed, said, "Like the rest of mankind, I am never quite sane at three o'clock in the morning."

The Christian world-view offers us a way to put our whole lives into perspective- whether the past, present, or future, whether the good, the bad, or the ugly. This is because the Christian view believes that the whole of life is under the wise and loving direction of a sovereign God. I say, "believes," because this is a faith claim. Like all faith claims this cannot be achieved by observation or verified by proofs. When St. Paul says, "And we know that all things work together for good..." Romans 8:28, he is saying that we know and are confident of this through faith in God.

Permit me, to again be autobiographical. My own life has been a life of extremes, extremes of tragedy and blessing. My beautiful and vivacious mother died of cancer just after my first birthday. My young father, lacking her faith and stability (she was his faith and stability), wandered, literally and spiritually, for the next twenty years. I was a fellow-traveler in these wanderings, moving over fifteen times before my thirteenth year. For a time, I lived with him and one of his several wives. She was a tragic mental and moral wreck, and having herself been a victim of abuse, abused me from the time I was five until I left at age thirteen.

But, from eighteen months til five, I lived with my paternal grandparents and their younger children in a household of pure love. They taught me what it is to be loved and cherished. This grounding in love enabled me to survive those bleak, dragon-filled years of abuse.

In my high school years, I lived with a Christian family who opened their hearts and home to me. I have written elsewhere in a critical vein of those years, but I want here to record my undying gratitude to them and many others like them who loved, nurtured, forgave, and put up with me. Many of these helped provide me with the financial assistance necessary for my formal education, and one unknown person paid for my first year of college- courses, books, room and board. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were motivated primarily out of their love for Christ and for me. I would be a cad if I did not recognize their role in my life and achievements.

My adult life has been spent in service to three Christian congregations. The first of these received me in my early twenties and survived the ten years I spent among them. (This is a argument for the existence of God!) My family and I were supported, encouraged, respected and loved by these people. In those ten years, there were many mistakes, petty quarrels, betrayals, and misunderstandings. Many are to blame for these things, not least of all myself. But, when Kathy and I visit the people from that time and place, the thing we indulge is our love for one another and for those who have gone.

My next church was a conservative congregation made up primarily of people the age of my parents and older. I was a child of the fifties, so I was in their minds like one of their adult children. I was also of a liberal bent of mind. Given those things, conflict was inevitable and sharp. They suffered from this, as did I. But, during the twenty-three years my family and I spent there, they generously supported us, enabled us to build a beautiful home, put up with my excessive travel to preach at conferences, tolerated and encouraged my art-making, and endured and forgave my eccentricities and all-out-less-than-Christian lapses in judgment and behavior. I buried most of that generation, and our mutual love for one another enabled me to turn their funeral orations into a final act of love and an art form.

During these years, Kathy and I have enjoyed a marriage of growing love and respect and have raised three beautiful, interesting children.

Now, all of these years have been marked by the same things that mark every human life: moral failure, ignorance and stupidity, miscommunication, good intention gone awry, bad intentions fulfilled (and, mercifully, thwarted), acts based on unworthy convictions, hurts, deaths... But, they have also been crowned with blessings: acts of love, self-sacrifice, altruism, humor, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, support, encouragement, and countless other things like these.

I am what I am today, not simply despite the bad things, but because of their mixture with the good. I have known darkness, but I have also enjoyed immeasurable, blinding light, the light of love. I have been loved and continue to be loved by countless people. I have been blessed to love them back. My life is multi-storied and rich because the stories of these people have become mine, and mine has become theirs. And this love has been lived out in the face of much human weakness and sin- theirs and mine.

All of which is true, I believe, because of the preexisting and over-arching love of God. The love of God has worked in my life in such a way as to make me a better sort of person. The love of all these various friends has worked in the same way: to make me a better sort of man. This is true despite my many moral and spiritual weaknesses, blind spots, and vulnerabilities.

Thus, God in his wise and loving sovereignty works the warp and weft of our lives, creating things of beauty and strength. This he does through his love and the love of other human persons.

Which leads me to say one, final thing: All of it, the whole sometimes baffling, always complex, but wondrously polychromatic thing, makes me grateful, grateful for each actor in the play and for the great Director of it all. Grateful.