Grateful Eyes and Open Hearts

·         Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid.  John Wayne

·         Life is hard. After all, it kills you.  Katharine Hepburn

·         Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.  David Gerrold

·         When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'  Sydney J. Harris

I have been reading through Exodus.  There is a lot going on in these early Exodus stories from the desert.  A lot of powerful things have happened, but bottom line, there the people of Israel are, in the desert.  And life is hard, scary, ugly hard.

The people are thirsty

hungry

besieged by enemies

But then something incredible important happens

God gets involved again,

And God rescues

Suddenly instead of hunger Manna

Instead of thirst, Water

Instead of sure defeat, victory……….

But in the end…..after all these positive things have happened

There the people of Israel are, still…

In the desert

And it is still hard times

And they still are in jeopardy

Still needing the help of God to make it through.

There are a lot of lessons here…. I struggled with what to pick out, but these are the one’s that kind of stuck in my head.

First lesson, God can do a lot.  In the Exodus stories God gives the people what they need.

But God doesn’t magically send them, or us to the Promised Land….

We don’t get to skip the desert…

And therein lies the problem.

When we are in the desert, when this are not going well,

It is so easy to lose sight of all that God has done, and instead, look at the desert…

That is one of our many problems… we so quickly focus on the negative

We know how the Israelites felt, as they faced that desert

We have been there, some of us may be in that place right now

But when we need to get through the deep water

To have our hunger dealt with

To have our thirst quenched….

We are asked to remember

That in the desert, God will be there.

It’s a matter of trusting. 

Trusting that the God who has acted, will act. 

Trusting that in spite of the fact that the

Resolution of those issues we face, is not complete

That in spite of the fact that we don’t magically end up with no problems.

God still acts

Still saves us from those things

That diminish and threaten us

Rosalind Russell was a beautiful movie star several decades ago. She was successful not only in Hollywood but also on Broadway. But perhaps her greatest triumph was her gallant fight against arthritis and cancer. After her death, this little poem was found tucked in her ever-present Bible:

"Trust him when dark doubts assail you.

Trust him when your faith is small,

Trust him when simply to trust him

Is the hardest thing of all.“

Trust him when simply to trust him is the hardest thing of all.”

This is the first lesson we can draw from today’s stories

This leads to the second thing that occurred to me.  That we are asked to be grateful, to have the eyes of gratitude.  Often we are gratitude challenged.  We human beings are never satisfied. We continually want more than we already have.

I have spent a little time around farmers.  One thing I know, they are rarely satisfied.  I used to sit in the Red Rooster in Reardan, Washington and listen to the wheat farmers.  If it rained there was there is too much rain, and they complained. If it didn’t rain they would say it was too dry.  Again, they would complain.  Quite honestly they were never happy

Nothing is ever quite the way we think it should be.  We have our agenda, and by golly God ought to get with it!  What’s wrong with God anyway?  Why doesn’t God just give us what we want.

Kind of silly isn’t it. But I go there.  Many of us do.  The point if this story is that God can be trusted, even in the hard times, to give us what we need

No, God doesn’t always lavish grace on us to the point that we have all we ever thought we wanted

It is not that we are so blessed that there are no longer any negatives.  Life often remains hard.

But this is the important thing to remember, from this story

There is enough

Notice that in the story God gives enough for each day…..In this story no more than enough.  They get only enough for a day -  but no less either,  they do get enough

Recently in the US, on TV and in big mega churches there are people preaching what is often called the prosperity Gospel.  This is a big thing in some circles.  Preaching that faith in God leads to affluence.  And the cool thing is the pastors personally prove it.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch article detailed accounts of the wealthy pastors club. According to the article, Creflo Dollar, who was just arrest for assaulting his daughter, drives a black Rolls Royce and travels in a $5 million dollar jet; Benny Hinn lives in a $3.5 million home and drives an $80,000 Mercedes-Benz G500.  You get the idea.  Salaries for these ministers are typically kept confidential. But in a 1997 CNN interview, Hinn said he earned between $500,000 and $1 million annually.  According to current estimates it is now much higher than that.

This theology's emphasis is on God's promised generosity in this life and the ability of believers to claim it for themselves. If God loves us, it teaches, then God will reward us with a new home, a good job, or good health.  Bottom line? God wants us to be prosperous.  Not just prosperous, amazingly rich!  We can faith our way to wealth.  If that were true I have some friends who would be amazingly wealthy!

But the Lord gave the Israelites just what they needed. What they received was good enough for a single day. The people we asked to not only trust, but to be grateful. To accept the gift, and find a sense of comfort with that, a sense of gratitude.  And sense that God, and what God was providing, was enough

What does gratitude do?

I is a huge part of what keeps us from always grasping, from hording…

It is interesting that the people of Israel could only collect enough for the day, no stockpiling.  What they tried to save spoiled, went rotten.

We have a tendency to stockpile for the future, for fear of running low or running out. Have you ever observed communities the day before a possible snowstorm or windstorm? People rush to the grocery, buying milk, bread and supplies, just in case. There’s a communal panic that seems to set in whenever the weather forecast sounds extreme.  

In hard times it is sometimes difficult, because of fear, to be generous.  It is hard to be generous when we are not grateful for what we have, but want more.

But

When we trust

And are grateful

We can have grateful attitudes

And with that open hearts

And ultimately open hands