Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: The Fair-Weather Gift-Lister

{Just getting back from Massachusetts after a surprise birthday party for my mom and dad, so today I’m posting thoughts from some recent Bible reading, rather than from an actual sermon, since I was in the airport instead of in front of an altar yesterday!}

Counting through the 700s on my way toward 1,000 gifts, a la Ann Voskamp, and on good days, on days when the sun slants golden on dewy grass and the kids clear their cereal bowls and wash the toothpaste gobs down the drain and don’t screech like baboons before 7 a.m., the gifts pour one after the other from pencil to paper.

On days when work projects flow smoothly and the team gets along and deadlines are met, and on days when dinner sits steaming on the table at 5:30 sharp and we don’t forget about soccer practice until four minutes before it starts, the gifts flow easily like sparkling water in a mountain stream.

On those days I’m really good at recording the gifts.

But I am a fair-weather gift-lister. Because on some days, no gifts are listed at all.

The days when the youngest tries on six pairs of pants in dim morning light and rejects each one, tossing them rumpled onto his bedroom floor, howling with indignation that none of them, absolutely none of them feel good. Days when the oldest sits slumped in the wing chair pouting about choir practice and refusing to eat breakfast. Days when the printer calls and there’s a typo on the magazine cover but they’ve already run 20,000 copies. Days when I’ve got my head buried in the recycling dumpster outdoors in search of the missing field trip permission slip.

On those days -- the ugly, chaotic, crabby, frenetic days -- I forget to count gifts. Or worse, I assume there are none. I don’t look.

The journal sits on the kitchen counter untouched, save a sprinkle of bagel crumbs scattered across its pages. The pencil has rolled onto the floor, where it’s wedged under the cabinet amongst the spilled lentils from last night’s dinner.

I believe Ann Voskamp when she states in One Thousand Gifts that God creates good out of bad. I believe this is true. But the reality, at least for me, is that this belief is much easier to live out in theory, on the pages that slide through my fingers, on the pages between the front and back covers of her book.

The reality is that I fail, more often than I would like to admit, to count blessings when they don’t come easily.

I’m not the first one to make this mistake. The Israelites did the same thing during their wilderness wandering. So focused were they on what they lacked, on their suffering and pain, they neglected to notice that God sustained them with food and water and shelter all along. They were blind to the miracles in their midst.

“They, our forefathers, became arrogant and stiff-necked and did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them.” (Nehemiah 9:16)

How easily I forget about God’s miracles when I am faced with difficulty. How often I forget to listen. How quick I am to close my eyes to the gifts that are presented just for me, even in the midst of chaos.

"The secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is,”  writes Ann.

It's difficult, this hard eucharisteo.

“We don’t have to change what we see,” Ann says to her angry, discouraged son. “Only the way we see it.”

So I keep practicing, day in and day out. And I pray to God to help me seek and find him where I doubt he exists and to change not what, but the way I see.  

I suspect I may be counting to 1,000 and beyond.

Still counting...

700. Sunflowers on the table
701. Sweet scent of cut grass
702. Rowan waving from the top of the school stairs
703. Bee with pollen legs
704. Bike rider bellowing, "Hello!"
705. Tylenol
706. Single pine needle glistening in morning sun
708. The man who picks a bouquet of flowers for his wife every week
709. Blue sky glimpsed through skylight
710. 72 degrees

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