29 June 2004

Something to give thanks for Back in my charismatic days, we had "prayer requests", when we could basically moan about all the things that needed fixing, and "praise reports" to even out the balance. This is a "praise report". I wanted simply to write about what a blessing it was to have a career I enjoy. It's all too easily taken for granted at times. Not yesterday, though. I was dragooned into helping Mom and Dad in the store. I hate working in the store. The giveaway clue is that from eight in the morning till four in the afternoon, I'm looking at the clock every five minutes to see how long I've got left. In my head I'm constantly calculating how much of my shift is over. I'm thinking, If I can just get to nine o'clock, that'll be a whole eighth of my shift over, and then it's only seven more of those till I knock off. Then at ten o'clock I'm saying to myself, See, a whole quarter of my shift has gone already. So I'll set twelve o'clock as a kind of breakthrough, a barrier through which I can crash and then have the satisfaction of thinking, Hey, I'm halfway through already. Now, if I can just do the same again, it'll all be over. I mean, I get so bored working in the store. If someone comes in and buys four sticks of gum, I'm excited, because it means I might have to refill the gum-rack, and at least that's something different to do to break the monotony. Anyway, it made me realize how fortunate I am to have a career I enjoy. When I get up in the morning to go to school, I don't dawdle around for ages trying to delay the start of the day as long as I can. When I get into the classroom, I'm not looking at the clock every five minutes and wondering when I'll get a break or when the day will be over. I'm not waiting anxiously for the bell to go so I can get out of school as fast as I can. I'm not daydreaming about what it'll be like to get to the end of the schoolday and go home, or clenching my teeth as I wait impatiently for the weekend to come around. I don't resent it if something keeps me behind after a class, or I have to stay in school an hour or two longer to catch up on this, that or the other. Actually, I don't think I realized I loved it so much until yesterday, when the stark difference between working in a school and working in my folks' store became so glaringly obvious to me. So, my praise report is this: Praise God for a career I enjoy, a career I find fulfilling. It's not something I should take for granted. It's something for which I am grateful. Dave 9:43:55 AM    comment [] A gift of silence I couldn't resist sharing a couple more thoughts from Robert Farrar Capon: [Forgiving] is essential. Even God forgives: he says he will remember our sins no more -- that he'll just forget about them and won't harp on about some exalted degree of justice that's not about to be forthcoming. So if the Ruler of the Universe can set such a low standard for justice, it ill behooves us the rest of us to sit around making a career out of keeping scores. ... [The] image of the divine forgetting ... (from Jeremiah 31:34, about the final covenant of mercy) suggests that even God is not above dropping the subject of sins. If you think about the death of God incarnate in Jesus on the cross, what is that if not the gift of God's silence to the world? After millennia of divine jawboning about the holiness of justice and the wickedness of sin, God himself simply shuts up about the whole business. He dies as a criminal, under the curse of the Law -- as if to say, 'Look, I'm as guilty as you are in this situation because I set it up in the first place; let's just forget about the blame and get on with the party.' (from The Mystery of Christ and Why We Don't Get It) I can't get over this one line: If you think about the death of God incarnate in Jesus on the cross, what is that if not the gift of God's silence to the world? Wow. Dave 9:17:03 AM    comment []

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