Seeing is all about the back story.

The Lord looks from heaven;
He sees all the sons of men.
From the place of His dwelling He looks
On all the inhabitants of the earth;
He fashions their hearts individually;
He understands all their works. Psalm 33:13-15

And I know that God is love hungry, for he is constantly pointing me to some dull, dead soul which he has never reached and wistfully urges me to help him reach that stolid, tight shut mind. Oh God, how I long to help you with these Moros. And with these Americans! And with these Filipinos! All day I see souls dead to God look sadly out of hungry eyes. Letters from a Modern Mystic, Frank Laubach

This morning, when I went to the exercise park like every morning, the guy who used to work with UNHCR and is the official translator for me and my new friends, told me that it makes everyone very happy that I come each day and exercise with them. And I turned and smiled and waved to the group working out on the bars, and they smiled and waved at me.

And yesterday when we went to the national parks and hung out with the thousands of Iraqis who bussed in from Baghdad and Mosel and Basra to splash around in the river and the waterfall and the practically freezing mountain temperature of 105, quite a few folks came up and shyly asked if I would hold their baby for a picture, or whether I would stand in the middle of their family for a group shot. Just like Everette and Simone in Vietnam. And sometimes, there was a back story. 

The blue-eyed lady posing with baby                  

 

Nathan ducking out of the picture

There is always a back story. Only One sees.

I was thinking about this as I was tromping past my daily trees, and I think it fits into my meditation on truly seeing. Maybe it is part of the healing process to see an emrîkî not dressed in camouflage fatigues carrying a large Beretta M9. Just like how someone texted me in response to yesterday’s photos of Rawanduz and Geli Ali Beg: I never imagined fun pretty places like this in the Middle East. The Middle East that is always at war. And the rich and powerful continue their air-conditioned, chauffeured life, and the rest, well, the rest are resilient and gracious.

And at first glance my experiment in giving was disappointing. I went and changed all of my twenties into assorted dinar and handed them out pretty cheerfully and indiscriminately to anyone who asked as we traveled through the day: the kids selling packs of gum got 5,000 dinar, the family with the tiny baby in a stroller got 10000, and so did the older lady sitting along the wall in the shade.

No one said, “Thank you.”

Not a single one even paused in the sing-song chanting of “alsadaqat lilfuqara'” (friendship for the poor) or the tugging on the shirtsleeves. And I am pretty sure my team was a little crabby with my experiment, because that meant that the gum kids stuck just like gum to us as we waded through the waterfalls, tugging at all of our shirtsleeves, relentlessly.

But then, of course, then I remembered the sad looks of Jesus. When only the Samaritan leper returned. When the rich young ruler walked away. When the disciples haggled about who forgot to bring bread or who was greatest in the kingdom and pushed back the bothersome children.

I am they. The ones who don’t pause in their litany of murmurs and fussing and complaints about how things aren’t going according to plan.

And the profound joy when people got it: The centurion and the Syrophoenician widow. And probably even when Peter first leaped out of the boat.

I am not succeeding in keeping God in my mind very many hours of the day, and from the point of view of experiment number one I should have to record a pretty high percentage of failure. But the other experiment - what happens when I do succeed - is so successful that it makes up for the failure of number one. God does work a change. The moment I turn to Him it is like turning on an electric current which I feel through my whole being. I find also that the effort to keep God in my mind does something to my mind which every mind needs to have done to it. I am given something difficult enough to keep my mind with a keen edge. The constant temptation of every man is to allow his mind to grow old and lose its edge. I feel that I am perhaps more lazy mentally than the average person, and I require the very mental discipline which this constant effort affords. Letters from a Modern Mystic, Frank Laubach

I am not sure my brain is lazy, but it is certainly distractable. And even though the verses seem to clash with the more hopeful “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” I get all of those striving and running the race sorts of verses.

So here we go again, Jesus. A new day.

Let me be the one who returns. Who falls on my face at Your feet and gives You thanks.

  

And help me learn to see. As You do, the One who sees all the sons of men, and sent His only Begotten Son.

 Lord, we are bound to You by grace, grafted into Your kingdom by love. Since the beginning of time You have given gifts of Your beauty and kindness and joy to us Your children. Teach us to embody Your loving presence in all that we do this day. Amen.

Beyond a mumbled grace

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. John 14:1

So I was pretty much soaring off the crabby charts.  Writing irate but of course fully justified letters to well-intentioned but misguided souls before the sun had started leaking through the many cracks in our front door.  

And in the midst of my three-point outlines with lots of supporting evidence and more than a few finely-honed words, God whacked me upside the head.  And brought to mind and heart a wondering question from Nicole, just wondering.  

So I went back to 1000 Gifts: Dare to live fully right where you are by Anne Voskamp and the story of the ten lepers and the one, the heathen, who returned to give thanks.  And it was this act of faith, this kneeling in gratitude, which made him whole.  Whole beyond the you-are-clean-and-have-the-priest-check-it-out whole, but soza whole.  

The Greek word soza is beyond whole.  It means saved, saved from who we are, from all of our bleak brokenness, into true wellness, complete wellness.  To live soza is to live the full life, the abundant life promised by Jesus, for which He came.  

We only live the full life if our faith gives thanks.  Thanksgiving is the evidence our our acceptance of what He gives.

If the church is in Christ, its initial act is always an act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.  Psalm 50:33

The act of sacrificing thank offerings to God—even for the bread and cup of cost, cancer and crucifixion—this prepares the way for God to show us Hs fullest salvation from bitter, angry, resentful lives and all sin that estranges us from Him.  At the Eucharist, Christ breaks his heart to heal ours—Christ, the complete accomplishment of our salvation, and the miracle of eucharisteo never ends. Thanksgiving is what precedes the miracle of that salvation being worked out in our lives. 

Because I wasn’t taking everything in my life and falling at His feet and thanking Him.  I sit still, blinded.  Sitting all those years in church but my soul holes had never fully healed.  

Eucharisteo, the Greek word with the hard meaning and the harder meaning to live—this is the only way from empty to full.

I may even have known that change requires more than merely thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about a door and a way through and that Greek word, eucharisteo, holding the mystery to the full life and the ever after.  

How in the world, for the sake of my joy, do I learn to use eucharisteo to overcome my ugly and self-destructive habit of ingratitude (that causes both my cosmic and daily fall) with the saving habit of gratitude—that would lead me back to deep God-communion?

And Jesus took the bread gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to them.  

Naming is Edenic.

I name gifts and I go back to the Garden and God in the beginning and who first speaks a name and lets what is come into existence.  This naming is how the emptiness of space fills: the naming of light and land and sea.  And the first man’s first task is to name.  Adam completes creation with his Maker through the act of naming creatures, releasing land from chaos, from the teeming, indefinable mass. 

All I can see, think is that the whim of writing one thousand gratitudes, the naming of the moments, is a holy work.  

In naming what is right before me, that which I’d otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible.

The name that spans my inner emptiness fill in the naming.

I name.  I know the face I face.

God’s.  God is in the details.  God in is the moment.  God is in all that blurs by in a life.  God.

It’s so frustratingly common—it’s offensive.

Driving nails into a life always is.

Paul said twice that he had to learn it—learn to be content and thankful.  And learning requires practice—sometimes even mind-numbing practice.  C. S. Lewis said it too, to a man looking for fullest life: “If you think of this world as place intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: but if you think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.”

Practice until it becomes second nature, the first skin.  Practice is the training, and training is the essence of transformation.  Practice, practice, practice.  Hammer, hammer, hammer.

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and 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 the early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rives that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and the good things that a good God gives. When we let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows.

This dare to write down a thousand things I love is really a dare to name all of the ways that He loves me.  To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable.  This is the value of the miracles.  The only thing that can change us, the world, is this—all His love. 

I am on number 200.  

Beyond a mumbled grace.  Naming His love, one moment after one moment.  Naming gives power and truth.  

When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.  Daniel 6:10-11

And all of Daniel’s wisdom and influence and true living.  Where did it come from?  Just wondering.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.  J. R. R. Tolkien