Grace

I am so thankful. Today I made pies, cranberry sauce, and cornbread dressing. I generally pig out on Thanksgiving and the day before, because it’s just too hard to be good. I have to taste the food while I cook it, and it’s very hard to resist eating the extra cornbread, not to mention the bacon I have to fry to get the grease. But today I forgot to eat lunch and had to make myself have home-canned chili at about 6 p.m. While I was eating it, I got a little concerned about my calorie total for the day, and I dumped a third of the chili and part of my Coke.

I could never do things like that in the past.

I have a big bag of size 34 Old Navy cargo shorts I have to get rid of. They’re going to Goodwill, along with my size 36 Levis and size 35 Ralph Lauren shorts. In a month or so, I expect to be getting tired of the size 32s I’m wearing now. They’re really more like 34s, but still, it will be great to downsize out of them.

“Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” Who, more than I, knows this to be true? I love and enjoy life more than ever, yet I am less and less attached to it. I don’t put my hope in it. Is this the way it’s supposed to work–have I been led to the blessings God intends for all of us to have–or am I just deluded?

Holding on to things out of fear is one of the fundamental errors of mankind. It’s bad for artists. It’s bad for investors. It’s bad for people who need to flee countries in turmoil. And it’s what we do when we insist on doing things our own way and trying to achieve happiness by earthly means. Over and over, the Bible tells us the same thing: give up what you treasure, and God will give you something better. Jump, and he will catch you.

Give the priests your first fruits, before you know the rest of the harvest is going to come in. Give them your best ten percent, in hopes that God’s blessing will outweigh the loss. Sacrifice the son through whom God said you would have descendants as numerous as the stars. Give your last handful of meal to a prophet, in the midst of a famine. Die on a cross so you can sit at God’s right hand and save the world. Follow in Jesus’s footsteps and count yourself part of the sacrifice, in order to have a fuller life here and perfect satisfaction in the world to come. Give up your own strength of character, in order to be given God’s. Over and over, we are told to exchange that which we can see and touch for that which we have been promised.

I love this life, but if I prize it too highly, it will be a curse to me. A bowl of pottage for me to eat, when I could have had a glorious birthright.

Luckily for me, it would be hard not to trust God, when things are going this well. I wish everyone had it so easy, and I wonder what it’s like for people who are farther along in faith and obedience and even more blessed. I wonder how they stand it.

A few weeks back, I was having a day when I kept feeling the presence of God very powerfully in my prayers, and it became so intense that at one point, I was a little afraid to continue, because I thought it would be too much. That was stupid of me, but the story says a lot about what is possible.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I hope every one of you will become at least as rich as I am.