Month: November 2022

Practicing Gratitude

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Ask any group of small children what they are thankful for, and you’ll likely get the same responses: my family, my friends, my pet, my home. You may get one or two kids who have interesting things to add, like my brother-in-law who once famously told his whole 3rd grade class that he was thankful for Kermit the Frog!  But for the most part, the answers will be pretty standard. It’s easy to be thankful for the good things in our lives.

But can we be thankful for things that are difficult?

Gratitude is more than just ticking off the checkboxes of good things in our lives. It can be a daily practice of looking for good in all things, especially those things which don’t appear to be that good on the surface. 

I work at a university, and when we returned from the pandemic lockdown, our campus post office stopped delivering mail to our offices every day, sticking to once a week. There were a lot of valid reasons for this decision, but it meant that on the other days, I had to walk across campus to pick up the mail myself.

Here was my initial reaction to this new situation:

This stinks! This is NOT in my job description. At my age I have to schlep all the way across campus and lug the mail back all by myself? This isn’t fair! What if the packages are heavy? I shouldn’t have to carry them!

After a few weeks, I realized that my grumpy attitude was not serving me, and was in fact seeping into other areas of my work. I had to figure out a way to be ok with this new situation. And I found the answer in the practice of gratitude. Each time I made a trip to the campus post office, I challenged myself to find something to be grateful for in the experience, and to write it down when I returned to my office. Here were some things that made it onto my list:

The pretty blossoms on the flowering trees
Running into a co-worker I hadn’t seen in a long time
The fresh air and warm gentle breezes
Getting to know the mailroom staff a little better each time I visited
The chance to stretch my legs after sitting at my desk for so long  

The list kept getting longer and longer and it changed my whole attitude toward this aspect of my job. Being grateful for things that are difficult doesn’t come naturally. But if you work at it, practicing a little bit each day, it will become an automatic response.

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, I challenge you to think of something that really bugs you. It can be something small and silly, or something bigger. Try to find some way to be grateful for that thing, and see how that act of gratitude changes your perspective in a way you might not have thought possible.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Keep Your Eyes Fixed on God

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Multitasking is a valuable skill.  It helps us in our jobs, in managing a household, and in taking care of loved ones. Being able to do many things at once keeps the wheels of life in motion. However, when it comes to negative emotions, multitasking has the opposite effect. Letting our thoughts bounce between worries, stressors, regrets, and pressures keeps us frozen in place. We find we are so overwhelmed by these emotions that we can’t move forward at all. The wheels will either get stuck in place or run off the road entirely.

So how can we avoid this kind of unhealthy mental multitasking? A fun example I’d like to share is playing Mario Kart with my sons. I should start by confessing that I’m pretty bad at video games. I was amazing at Pac Man, Space Invaders, and Frogger back in the 1980s, but my skills got pretty rusty after that. So I almost never win a race in Mario Kart. In fact, just staying on the track is usually all I can manage. 

These video games have a lot of sensory overload. Colorful animated tracks, a fun and lively musical soundtrack, and many characters crowding the track. And there’s a lot you can do on the way. You can pick up items and use them to sabotage other players or give yourself extra powers. You can take shortcuts. You can peek at the screens of the other players to see what they might be planning. Experience has taught me that if I try to do any of those extra tasks, I’m sure to crash, run off the road, or occasionally start driving in the wrong direction without even realizing it! For that reason, my strategy is simple – just drive. I keep my eyes fixed on the road and keep moving around the track, ignoring all the distractions along the way.

During times of stress or emotional overload, this is how I like to keep my eyes fixed on God. I ignore all the distractions around me and just try to focus on God’s presence before me. It doesn’t make the roadblocks or pitfalls go away, but it keeps me moving past them.

Author Steven Covey once wrote: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” For me, the “main thing” is my belief in a loving God who guides my journey every step of the way. Keeping my eyes fixed on that has been my best defense against mental multitasking.

Keeping your eyes fixed on God requires faith—a belief that God has a plan for your life and is working in your life for good.  It requires prayer—a relationship with God that is active and alive. And it requires practice. Negative emotions are going to always be there to distract you and pull you further away from God, but with time and practice you can get better at not giving those emotions so much of your attention.

So the next time the race track in your mind is swirling with activity, remember to keep your eyes on the road and just drive.

Practicing Stillness

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“Be still and know that I am God”
Psalm 46:10

I love writing about stillness. On the surface it seems like a very simple practice, but in reality it can be difficult to achieve. Our world doesn’t make it easy to be still! Yet I believe it’s a critically worthwhile endeavor…for being still in the present moment is the best way to experience God.  

In a busy world and a sometimes chaotic society, roadblocks to stillness often come from the outside world. But just as often, they can come from within—through our own thoughts and habits. In my experience there are three ways that we tend to leave the present moment in our lives.

Focusing on doing instead of being

How often do you find yourself doing one thing, but your mind is spinning with other things you know you need to do? You might be eating lunch at your desk, but you’re not thinking about what your sandwich tastes like, instead you’re thinking about what you’re going to say at that meeting after lunch or the errands you need to run when you get home from work. Multitasking isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes it’s what we need to do. (If I’m being totally honest, I’m eating my lunch as I write this post!) But it’s important to realize that when we do this, we are taken out of the present moment.

Focusing on our worries about the future

When something is making you feel anxious, how much time do you spend running the scenarios? Thinking about everything that can go wrong and coming up with a plan for every possible outcome. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is incredibly common, and I know very few people who can resist doing this. It’s important to be aware of how often our minds dwell in the future and to recognize that when they do, we’re not here in the present.

Focusing on regrets of the past. 

It’s so easy to focus on things that we missed, things that we couldn’t do or lost out on. How much time do you spend thinking back on things that have already happened that you can’t do anything about? In this case I’m not talking about pleasant memories of the past, but rather regrets. Lost opportunities, harsh words, uncomfortable interactions. There are lots of ways to become lost in regret and every time we do, again, we aren’t really here.

All of these things have the same result of taking us out of the present moment. It’s the fastest way to get pulled off that path on our journey to spiritual wholeness. When we leave the present moment, we lose sight of God. We lose our sense of purpose. And we’re less able to focus on what’s really important.

In her book Mystical Hope, Cynthia Bourgeault writes: “The spiritual life can only be lived in the present moment, in the now. All the great religious traditions insist upon this simple but difficult truth. When we go rushing ahead into the future or shrinking back into the past, we miss the hand of God, which can only touch us in the now.”

The key to practicing stillness is to stay here with God in the present moment. Think of your mind as a busy airport. Your thoughts are like planes constantly taking off and landing. Backing up at the gates or circling the airspace waiting to land. Or maybe they’re like the crowded terminals jam-packed with worries and distractions. You need to take time on a regular basis to let those planes land. To empty out the terminals. To be still. When you let your mind settle, all past and future thoughts fade away, and you make room for God in the here and now.

May you find some time this week to experience stillness, where you can encounter the hand of God touching your life. Amen! 

Picking Crab Apples

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One day this fall, a student asked me for a spare paper bag so he could pick some crab apples from the tree outside my campus office building. I was puzzled by his request because I never knew crab apples were good for anything (besides dropping on the sidewalk and smushing up under my shoes!) The student surprised me by telling me he was going to use them to make jam.

He explained that the crab apple is just a smaller apple. No one thinks to eat them because we like things that are big and pretty. What a wonderful new insight! I thought the tree outside my building was just ornamental, only meant to be enjoyed for the pretty pink blossoms in the spring. I have since learned that crab apples can be eaten and have the exact same nutritional value as regular apples, just in a smaller package.

How can this old adage, “good things come in small packages” apply to our faith lives? What immediately comes to mind is the parable of the mustard seed:

“He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-32)

A podcast on Contemplative At Home calls this “a tiny parable about a tiny thing.” Jesus wants us to see that small beginnings can lead to powerful results. Things that start small can grow and spread. We often discount these tiny movements in our hearts, because we live in a world that celebrates everything that is big and bold and extravagant. It’s easy to feel that the way we express our faith is “not enough.” This parable reveals that the seed holds so much hope and possibility. Even the smallest amount of faith can be enough to set you off on your journey towards God. A journey that will blossom and grow, with branches that intertwine with those you encounter along the way.

Equally important as our small bits of faith are our small actions. My encounter with this student picking crab apples also reminded me of the famous quote by Mother Theresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” The world is filled with huge problems and inconceivable amounts of human suffering. It’s hard to believe anything we could do would actually make a difference. Where could we even begin? Well…we begin by doing something small. It may feel insignificant, or woefully inadequate. But the love that accompanies each small act will magnify and warm the hearts of whoever may be receiving the act of kindness. And that’s how it begins to spread.