Give thanks for thanks

Give thanks in every situation because this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

~ 1 Thessalonians 5:18, CEB

It's the week after Thanksgiving. I decided to do the least clever thing possible this week and talk about gratitude in our Sunday morning service.

I'll be honest- gratitude isn't my favorite topic. I'm not a naturally grateful person. Now- I'm also not an ungrateful person. But I don't really have gratitude practices and it always seems trite to me to suggest them. I think of people who are really hurting and I think to myself, I couldn't possibly suggest that they practice gratitude. That would be insensitive. It seems a bit like kicking someone when they're down to suggest they do something that I know is going to be nearly impossible in this moment.

I don't have a neat outline for this post- but perhaps my first point is something like this: It might be a good idea to be discerning about when you suggest gratitude to someone else.

Point two might be something like this: Start gratitude practices when you're not in the middle of a crisis or a particularly low moment. It'll be easier- gratitude will be closer at hand.

Now- let's talk about this passage for a moment. People talk about this passage as if it says Give thanks for every situation. Guess what- it doesn't say that. It says give thanks in  every situation.

What's the difference?

In vs. for is a big difference here. "For" implies you need to be grateful for anything that happens to you. "In" implies finding gratitude regardless of the circumstances, meaning you could find gratitude for something other than what is happening to you.

I see no reason to believe you need to be grateful for horrific things that have happened to you or that were done to you. But, God seems to think there is a benefit to finding some positive to bring to mind even when you're hurting. This doesn't mean that you need to overlook or ignore the harm that's done and it doesn't mean you use the positive to push down or squeeze out or "stuff" the struggle. It just means we learn to do two things at once.

The question is- how do we do this? And I'll make that my question for you. How do you find gratitude in the midst of struggle? What are your tips, tricks, or suggestions?

Feel free to share these in our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/NorthstarCommunity/) Other people might benefit from your wisdom.

The spiritual practice of Acknowledgment

Last week Scott talked about acceptance in his blog post and during his message on Sunday at NorthStar Community. The requirement to understand this blog is to not forget what Scott wrote in the last one - acceptance is a pre-requisite before any of us will ever feel safe enough to practice today's spiritual practice: acknowledgement. Acknowledgement is impossible without safety; acceptance provides safety and enables us to get on with the business of acknowledgement. Without these two A's - acceptance and acknowledgement - I have no clue how people change and grow.

What do I mean by acknowledgement? Acceptance of the truth plus. Plus what? Acceptance of the truth SAID OUT LOUD. If we don't say it out loud, it is not acknowledgement, it's just an idea we think about as possibly true. It's a secret shame. It's a hidden part of ourselves that isolates us and makes us feel lonely.

Acknowledgement is a spiritual practice that is best taught, in my opinion, in the rooms of AA, NA and the like. These rooms are loaded with doses of "Been there, done that." And although judgment is as present in some mutual aid society spaces as everywhere else on planet earth, if one is to find it, this is a more likely place than many other options.

One of the most trying places to create an environment for acknowledgement to flourish as a practice is where people are committed to the "rightness" of their way of seeing. This kind of certainty brings judgment into the room, breaks the rules of safety and causes us to armor up rather than open up. Families who are committed to the belief that their family member who is struggling with a substance use disorder is the problem rather than a symptom of the family's problem will not see much reason to acknowledge anything - except for the fact that they want this problem solved. Move on. Nothing to see here. Acknowledgement, on the other hand, would free the family to see that the problem is the disease and the entire family breaks out in symptoms, not just the one who is using.

Another confusion that stifles this beautiful spiritual practice is a misunderstanding about the nature of our thoughts, beliefs and even our values. These are all preferences. They are limited by our personality, experience, knowledge, exposure and even trauma. We think we have the facts on our side - and often we do - but our thoughts, opinions, beliefs and values are all INTERPRETATIONS of those facts. There are places in the world where a woman must not show her knees in public, but her boobies can hang out for all the world to see. You'd get arrested for that in my county.

When we are certain of our beliefs/thoughts/opinions, acknowledgement is very, very difficult. And when we cannot acknowledge things that are important to notice, growth is stymied. If we figure this out, we become capable of paradigm shifts that promote growth, change and healing. A family with proper education and a willingness to learn discovers that the whole family has been impacted by the disease of addiction. Everyone can do the uncomfortable work of changing their relationship with the actual problem. Amazingly, when this happens, what once seemed like an impossible problem to solve can be acknowledged and dealt with in ways that bring about meaningful solutions.This requires curiosity, and acknowledgement, and acceptance. We need to open up to new perspectives that our own limited way of seeing could never come to without some shifts in our assumptions.

My daughter was a pitcher on a softball team that was extremely traumatizing and ended up ruining her pitching arm. Her father and I failed to acknowledge the abuse because we were not paying the right kind of attention. During an All Star game when she was 13 years old, she pitched a no-hitter in 106 degree heat with an abusive coach yelling, "Throw strikes!" (which she was doing by the way) the entire game. He was a scary dude.

I thought this was very bad form on his part and told my husband as much. He explained how I just didn't understand the game. But what I would suggest is that lots of times we are saying and doing and yelling things because it's always been said, done and yelled without understanding why what we are saying, doing and yelling is a problem.

Living transparently (being able to acknowledge stuff) is the OPPOSITE of the way we live most of the time. We say, "Bless her heart" in the South when we really mean, "I hope you get hit by a bus on the way home from the Piggly Wiggly." Maybe we don't want the bus to squish a person, but we are fine if it results in a broken hip.

Acknowledgement is what happens when we stop fooling ourselves and talk to others about what we really feel, mean, fear, hate, think and believe. When we stop distracting ourselves by critiquing and evaluating others and instead, turn the focus on ourselves - with full acceptance - it is amazing what we discover. It's humbling. Without full acceptance, we cannot do this kind of personal inventory. But with acceptance, we can wake up to the old patterns of seeing, doing and yelling and MAKE A CHOICE to switch off our auto-pilot and reconsider who we want to be and what we want to do about the disconnect between our imagination and our reality.

I wish my husband and I could have worried less about whether or not we were teaching our daughter to be a quitter or us being overly protective and have instead ACTUALLY PROTECTED OUR DAUGHTER. We were wrong. This is not how the game is played; this is how one man did not know how to coach without doing so in an abusive manner. Our failure to acknowledge that was wrong. We were wrong. We failed our daughter. This is the greater truth in our story - what are some hard truths in your stories? I hope you have a safe place to practice acknowledgement because it is the only way to make progress on becoming your most authentic and glorious-created-in-the-image-of-God self.

"Don't foot yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don't act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like."James 1:22-24 The Message

Acceptance: What is it good for?

Yesterday (if I scheduled this correctly), we started a Sunday morning series on spiritual growth and we began that series with a conversation on "acceptance."

Perhaps we should first ask the question: Why is acceptance important?

I suppose we could answer this in no less than 1,000 different ways. For starters- we all have things happen in our lives that we wish didn't happen. Things we don't want to tolerate. Things we don't want to "accept." Things we want to fight. You know what these things are: financial hardships, difficult relationships, losses, disappointments. Wishing these things didn't happen does not help us feel better and it does not help us solve our problems. This is why acceptance is important. If we don't do it- our problems will stay right in front of our face. Or they may increase. We accept things in order to confront our problems head-on and, potentially, to help us resolve these problems.

The next question is: What is acceptance? As will become a theme in this post, I don't want to overthink this. Acceptance is heart or gut territory, not so much head territory.

As far as I can tell, acceptance is the sense that, "The past does not need to change for me to be okay." Or a sense that, "I'm going to get through this." Or, "Even though I don't like this, I will survive." It's a matter of tolerating things that are uncomfortable. It's not learning to like things that are hard or appreciate things that hurt us. It's learning to live with them.

I personally have mixed feelings about the term "acceptance" and the role it plays in a spiritual life. On the one hand, it's a concept that resonates with many (if not most) people, including myself. I see it, at a minimum, as a significant step on the journey towards a contented life. On the other hand, I'm not quite sure how to describe the process of learning to accept things. I would love to be able to tell people exactly how to do it, and I'm not sure I know how.

When I'm counseling, acceptance comes up quite often and there are counseling techniques that exist to teach people how to accept difficult circumstances. In Dialectical Behavior Therapy, radical acceptance is a multi-step process that involves making room for emotions we would rather just push away as well as making plans for coping with whatever challenging circumstances we're facing. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy relies on very similar ideas- emphasizing the importance of tolerating all emotions because of the belief that fighting how we feel (i.e., "I shouldn't feel this way," or, "If I were good I wouldn't feel this way") only leads to further suffering.

While these ideas are good and helpful, it seems to me that acceptance, from a spiritual perspective, is about something more, and I can't pinpoint what that thing is. For one thing, acceptance isn't just about uncomfortable emotions. We may need to accept situations themselves or people's attitudes or behavior towards us, not just the feelings that come up as a result of hard life circumstances or being in relationship with difficult people.

For instance, if someone punches me in the face, I might feel humiliated. Is it important that I learn to accept that humiliation? Yes. However, it also seems to me that I need to find a way to accept 1. the fact that I got punched in the face (I might feel, for instance, like "this should not have happened to me") and 2. the person who punched me in the face (so as to fend off resentment, as well as the possibility of retaliation). All that to say, acceptance isn't just about embracing difficult feelings and it's not just about making plans about "what to do differently next time." It's also the sense that despite what's happened, everything is going to be okay. (Let's be clear- "Okay" can be defined quite broadly. It doesn't mean everything returns to how it was, or that everything will turn out exactly as we hoped it would.)

Let me back up for a second. I find myself sitting here typing all these various components of acceptance while I try to figure out how to describe what acceptance is. The problem with all this is- acceptance simply is not a "headspace" type of activity. It's not about having the correct definition nor is it about knowing all the correct steps to take in order to guarantee that, at the end of the process, acceptance takes place. (At least, in my opinion).

Acceptance strikes me as being similar to so many other facets of faith and recovery where we enlist the famous Potter Stewart quote, "I know it when I see it." Or, perhaps in the case it's something more like, "I know it when I experience it."

So, how do we experience it?

Well- that's another question that could easily transition us into the head space. I'll try to avoid that and comment on two things that seem to open the door towards acceptance for me, and hope that this somehow resonates with someone else.

1. I have to want to do it. I don't know how to make myself want to accept something difficult. However, I know when I don't feel like doing it. I know when I'm resisting doing it. Perhaps this is a matter of "readiness." I know when I'm ready, and I know when I'm not. I do not know how to make myself ready. However, following the path of DBT and ACT, it seems important to be able to offer myself compassion when I am not ready and to tell myself, "I would like to be able to accept ____, but I find myself resisting it at the moment."

2. I have to create some space in order to do it. I need some silence and some time to sit in that silence. Could I tell you exactly what to do with that silence and space? No. I don't have that answer. But there is some part of me that intuitively knows it helps.

Is this an exhaustive list? Certainly not. I hope that you readers will chime in with your own ideas and practices (our Facebook group is a good place for this). I also hope that it is a starting place. And so maybe in this spirit I'll leave you with some questions as opposed to "wrapping up" acceptance.

• Is there anything you're currently struggling to accept?

• Why is it important to you to accept it?

• What steps do you think you need to take in order to practice acceptance?

• What's the first, small, simple, step you could take?

People are plotting to do “good”

In an unprecedented move at Northstar Community, last week's blog focused on satan. I personally learned a ton - if you haven't read it, I recommend it. It'll be worth the scroll back! However, I just cannot give satan a day without addressing an idea that for many of us, feels like the opposite of our childish imaginings of satan. Guardian angels. I was first exposed to the concept in the classic movie, "It's a Wonderful Life." Clarence, a hapless angel hoping to earn his wings somehow manages to assist George Bailey and help him find his best life.

The movie itself intrigues me. Although we are all supposed to believe that George Bailey is a good guy, after obsessively watching this movie for decades every Christmas, my adult eyes came to understand George in ways my child's perspective could not comprehend. George is an angry guy. He's resentful. He's depressed and contemplating suicide. His dreams have been thwarted at every turn. In today's world, George's behavior toward his wife would be considered abusive. George Bailey is a guy who the community thinks of as honorable; he does the "right" thing. But George is dragged down by the expectations and obligations of others. He is a reluctant, very resentful servant.

I missed this about George for years because in my mind, George's perspective makes sense. Even when doing his best - heroic, noble actions - he still ends up with negative consequences! Who wouldn't resent this? it took me awhile to see that this movie is as much about the dark as it is the light. Evil lurks. It is not just another feel good Christmas movie. An entire community stands on the precipice of a decision: will we or won't we be a people that look out for one another? Are we a community that believes in the law of scarcity and every man, woman and child must fend for themselves? Or are we a community that believes that for the sake of the whole, the individual sometimes must curb their own personal preferences in deference to the greater good?

How does the world work? Are there teams of good versus evil at war in the world? I do not know. Evil exists. But if I understood last week's blog post, I believe that Scott was suggesting that whether or not evil exists, we will be better served by focusing less on these big, impossible-to answer-questions and turn our attention instead to focusing on how we can support one another in a world that sometimes makes it easier to believe in the darkness than the light.

Can we count on having our own personal guardian angel Clarence to help us sort all this out? Guardian angels are not something I heard much about through my Southern Baptist heritage, so on this matter I turned to the experts. A reliable ex-nun turned Episcopal priest said this, when asked about the existence of guardian angels from the Catholic tradition, "God is present with us; today is no different than the angels in the bible." So yes, angels are a thing. I did some research and found articles that support the existence of guardian angels. They use scriptures to support their position that are...questionable. Most are playing fast and loose with biblical interpretation. But the Catholic Church is not pushing back on the idea either. I like what a friend of mine said when asked about his perspective, "It may not be something the Catholic Church teaches explicitly, it is something they kinda allow people to believe."

I do not know where you land on the subject, but I found a helpful perspective in William R. Miller's book, Lovingkindess. It is not an argument for or against believing in "Clarences", but it does shed some light on how we might want to adjust our world view.

It is in his chapter on hope, a concept he believes includes an anticipation and expectation of the best in others, in life, and in the future that Miller adds, "One pundit quipped that the opposite of paranoia is narapoia: the belief that people are secretly plotting to do you good."

So much of how we think about life is not factual. Our thoughts, ideas, feelings, beliefs...they are not facts. They are preferences. We often argue about our perspective and posit facts to support our claims. But dive deep. Facts are open to interpretation. Hear me on this - a fact is a fact, but the way we use that fact is our interpretation. Tonight it will be in the mid-60's - warm for this time of year; my daughter's in-laws visiting from New Mexico think tonight is going to be cold for this time of year. The temperature is the fact; how we perceive it is based on our personal experiences. We're walking through life interpreting it through our experiences, which leads us to have particular preferences. Maybe it is easier for some of us to see the world as dark and scary; others have a penchant for sunny side up. At the end of the day, we are making a million choices a day that are far less about the facts than they are a reflection of our limited perspective.

I prefer to think about life through the lens of "narapoia: the belief that people are secretly plotting to do you good." This is a choice. I am making a decision. This is a shift for me but I'm old and I've decided - I prefer to pay attention to the ways people and circumstances are secretly plotting to do me good than dwell on my perception of times when I think people have hurt me.

Over the years, as I age, I have grown so bored with the stories of my life that are on the darker side of the human experience. They're still true. They happened. But I am no longer fighting to squeeze meaning out of them. Why? Because I understand that there is so much I will never know. I cannot change the facts but my interpretation of them shifts depending on whether I look through the lens of paranoia or narapoia. And today, I choose narapoia. Which is really saying, I think, that I do believe in angels. And I can name so many of them that have shown up in my life. I have come to realize that even the darkest moments of my life have never been without the presence of narapoia.

Scott couldn't give us much definitive lowdown on satan and evil; I cannot provide you proof of guardian angels. But I can see the light of love that surrounds me and mine. And for that, I am grateful. May your day be filled with increased awareness of narapoia.

What should you think about Satan?

What's the difference between evil and sin? Who is satan and what role does he play in these things. These are big questions, and in this week's post I'm going to tell you exactly what you should think about them. Sort of.

Strap in, this one is going to be looooong.

Satan

It's become trendy in trendy Christian circles (oxymoron?) to not believe in satan. It's not cool anymore- it's like we've all grown up and we've stopped believing in Santa and we want to tell all the other kids to stop believing in him too. Spoiler alert- I do believe that satan exists, but perhaps not in the stereotypical way we think of him.

Consider Job 1. It paints a picture of God holding a board meeting with the "heavenly beings." Among the heavenly beings is, you guessed it, satan. Now, in Hebrew, satan (ha satan....roughly) is a word, and it means "an adversary," or in the case of Job 1, the adversary. So, long story short, the satan wasn't just the evil opposite of God who lived in hell, he was a part of the council of heavenly beings and it was his job, apparently, to be a naysayer.

We'll spare you the nuts and bolts of a history lesson here. But- a funny thing happens. When the OT gets translated into Greek, rather than using the Greek word for "adversary," they used a Greek word that sounded like "satan" (satanos) and this gave the impression that Satan was the name of the a person, rather than a role or title. Slowly over time we start to think of Satan as being an evil hell-dweller who does all the evil stuff and is red and has a pitchfork and so on. A very different image from Job 1, we can all agree, which describes a kind of annoying guy who goes around looking for ways to prove God wrong, or upstage Him, or what have you (and let's be clear- this annoying guy is given quite a bit power, by God). But, even so, this is a strange linguistic phenomenon: a somewhat bizarre translation decision spawned Satan.

Now, does this mean the satan is not an evil hell-dweller? Well, I'm not so sure. The New Testament certainly makes references to the "evil one" and suggests that there is a personal element behind sin and evil, as if there is a grand director of evil who is looking for fresh recruits. Even so, the adversary's relationship to God, as well as to us, is rather unclear. Do they still have meetings together? I have no idea. Perhaps his designated number of years on God's board of directors expired and he know works as a freelancer in a gig economy.

The bottom line, for me, is that it seems perfectly biblical to believe that sin and evil is a force that lives in the world outside of us and that it has a desire or a purpose: to pull us away from God. Now, let me caveat this again. There was this whole "satanic panic" thing that happened in the aftermath of the release of William Friedkin's The Exorcist in 1973 that still exists in many Christian communities today. The net result of this satanic panic is the belief that satan, demons, and evil all live in our bedrooms closets and other nearby places and they're trying like hell (pun intended) to make you evil too.

Just a personal aside- I don't know anyone who I would describe as purely evil. And I don't think I've ever seen someone go from functioning as a "regular non-evil type" to committing murders and becoming destructive and things like that overnight. Most people are going about their business, living pretty regular, non-evil lives, and occasionally making mistakes. So, anecdotally, I see no reason to live in constant fear that a demon is "gonna get ya."

(Also as a side note- I knew one exorcist when I was in seminary- and he didn't do a lot of business. So, if the only game in town isn't thriving...we can probably put some of those worries to bed).

Sin, Evil, and You

Let's set satan aside for a minute and talk about sin, evil, and how it relates to who you are as a person.

The Greek word for sin is hamartia. One of its translations is "missing the mark." It seems to me that this is a rather helpful way to think about sin. We can miss the mark in different ways. We can behave in ways that we feel are NOT indicative of who we are for a number of reasons. It could be because we're overwhelmed. And, we can be trying to do one thing and become tempted to do another. Self control, we might call that. We can miss the mark because we don't understand something or because something isn't clear to us or because we lack all the information we might need. We can make simple mistakes.

It can also be more intentional. Suppose get angry and want to take revenge on someone, or punish them for what they've done to us, or because sometimes it feels "good" to be "bad." Can anyone deny this? Rebelling is fun. It's just not always in our long-term best interests.

In any case, this is all very human and understandable. But, as we consider these possibilities, where is the transition between sin and evil? Well, that's complicated. I'm going to give you two answers to this- one is the biblical answer, and one is a more pastoral answer.

• On the biblical side of things, scripture uses the word evil a lot more casually than we do. It is evil, in the New Testament, to resist God's way of seeing things, or to oppose God's actions- perhaps even when it is unintentional. It is considered evil, in Matthew, when people ask Jesus to prove himself. They were doing this to trap him and make a fool of him, so there's that. But even so, this kind of thing might be more of an eyeroll or shoulder shrug scenario for us than something we'd really consider evil.

• I suspect that this brings up a lot of questions for many of you. Does this mean I'm worse off than I thought? Does this mean I'm evil? Does this mean I'm unlovable? And so on. One of the things that is going on here is simply a cultural difference. The people of the Bible, which of course spans a long stretch of time, are more simple people. They are more simple thinkers. Frankly, they were a far more primitive people. They thought in black-and-white terms, and we see that reflected in scripture. You are either sinful and evil, or you are a child of God and good, that kind of thing. We do not need to adopt that kind of thinking in order to remain faithful today.

• For my pastoral answer, I would say this. Regardless of whether or not sin and evil are the same thing, there are two important things to keep in mind. One, there are obviously levels to all this. It became quite a common thing to say in churches at some point: every sin is as bad as another, so a white lie is as bad as murder. That is quite obviously untrue. If you tell your child you're proud of them when you aren't, that does not make you the moral equivalent of Hitler. Two, even if you were the moral equivalent of Hitler, this is not a problem for God because God is powerful enough to transform you into a child of God, and at that point He will refuse to hold your past against you.

So you're probably wondering, "Wait, so what was the pastoral answer to all this? This seems like bad news!"

I'll make it simpler. Regardless of who you are or what you've done, you're not evil. You're not evil, and everything is going to be okay. God is going to take care of you because He loves you just as He loves all His children. You are, at times, going to miss the mark, as we all do. But as a child of God, you can know that He is going to overlook that and that He will not hold it against you because He doesn't want to hold things against you. There is evil in the world, of course. Evil itself will, at times, try to tempt you away from God's way of seeing. Perhaps you will succumb to that temptation, at times, and perhaps at others you won't. In either case, you are a child of God. You are a beloved part of his family. He will not push you away. He will remain close, to guide you, comfort you, nourish you, and to slowly transform you more and more into the most hopeful version of you.

As for evil the force and satan the person, well, God has plans to take care of all that too.