Actual Lived Lives
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. James 1:17
Insight
Before “Karen,” we had “The Church Lady.”
I’ve probably watched SNL less than ten times in my forty-some odd years, but somehow I’m still familiar with this pious, stick-in-the-mud caricature. The sketches are funny because it mirrors something we’ve experienced in real life. Unfortunately, we’ve probably all known someone who prided themselves on being devout while also being joyless and self-righteous.
Tish Harrison Warren writes in her book The Liturgy of the Ordinary, “The church has a reputation for being anti-pleasure. Many characterize Christians in general the way H.L Mencken wryly described Puritans: people with a haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.”
As Christ-followers, it’s backwards from what we know to be true. God is the Creator of pleasure. He made us to delight, and has given us the means to experience it. This is evident as we read in Genesis about creation and the Garden of Eden. Eden itself means “place of pleasure and delight” and was a gift from God to Adam and Eve.
In the creation story, God spends five of the seven days creating nature: making light, the heavens and the earth, the mountains and the sea, the plants and the animals. Warren writes, “ When we enjoy God’s creation, we reflect God himself. God does not stoically pronounce creation “good,” like a disinterested manager checking off a quality checklist so he can clock out early. God delights in the perfect acoustics of ocean waves, swoons over the subtle intensity of dark chocolate, and glories in robins’ eggs and peacock calls.”
There is a God-given reason why we delight in taking hikes, sunbathing at the beach, watching the sun rise and set. We are made in God’s image. When we take delight in His creation- our soul’s pure, natural response declaring it good - we are reflecting the very character and essence of who God is.
As we read on through Genesis, we see that God gives us relationships, with each other and Himself, as well as the companion joys of purposeful contribution and rest - all avenues for us to have pleasure and experience delight.
When we continue to read the passages in Genesis, we can also see on this side of the fall how our ability to delight can be muted, warped, and sometimes, extinguished.
Delight is smothered, when like Adam and Eve, we believe that what God has for us- what He has promised- isn’t enough. Ungrateful and unsatisfied, we indulge and cheapen what God has given us. And in the absence of pure delight, we make idols and content ourselves with the counterfeit. Exhausted from chasing after lesser things, we eventually become numb.
I believe we awaken delight with the stewardship and gratefulness for our actual lived lives.
Our Pastor of Faith Formation, Rick Shafer, introduced this phrase to me in the context of the hymn “I Surrender All.” The emphasis for me has always been the “surrender” part. I don’t know if I’ve ever contemplated the “all” until Rick reframed it for me as my Actual Lived Life. My all isn’t some ethereal concept, but the nuts and bolts- the ordinary reality- of who I actually am and the life I’m actually living, right now.
The starting place of delight is the acknowledgement that we are the masters of our affection; we choose to love what we love. This doesn't mean we white-knuckle our days, deluding ourselves into loving a miserable existence. Instead, it’s a perspective that sees abundance because its gaze is fixed on God, understanding that what we love is born from our thoughts and habits.
Stewardship begins by being aware of what we love, feeding what we know we should and starving the rest. Stewardship is the caretaking of the specifics God has bestowed uniquely on each of us - our responsibilities, our circumstances, our relationships, our character, our dreams and goals. It’s the shedding of destination thinking and the refusal to become stuck in a comparison trap. It’s to be all there, to show up, in our actual lived lives, no matter how messy or imperfect. When we steward well, delight wells up.
Gratefulness is looking at our actual lived lives and being full. It doesn’t mean that we abandon our hopes for the future, or that we ignore our disappointments, pain, suffering, and grief for some sense of false optimism. Instead, gratefulness is embracing the miracle of enough; tasting and seeing that the table God has set before us truly satisfies.
Gratefulness is both the impetus to delight and a byproduct of it. Both whet our appetite for the other. We can’t declare something is good, without also being grateful for it. Sometimes we can feel grateful for something so richly and solidly, that delight overflows in response.
When we delight in a sunset, we aren’t consumed by thoughts of tomorrow’s. We are blown away with what we see in the actual moment before us and it is enough. May we come to see and experience, and delight, in our lives..our actual lived lives…in the very same way.
Prayer and Reflection
Read verse 1 from the hymn I Surrender All (Judson W Van DeVenter 1896) as a prayer to God:
All to Jesus, I surrender;
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.
I surrender all, I surrender all,
All to Thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
When you get to the word “all”, think “my actual lived life.” What would it look like to surrender your “all” to Jesus? How do you see stewardship and gratefulness contributing to your ability to delight?
Donna Piner, Administrative Manager for the office of Pastor, wrote today’s devotional.