Stephen
Terry, Director
A
Life of Praise
Commentary
for the August 27, 2022, Sabbath School Lesson
"Rejoice
in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be
evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious
about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with
thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which
transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ
Jesus." Philippians 4:4-7, NIV
Many years ago, while I was
enrolled as a theology student at Walla Walla College, I worked as an aide at a
local hospital to help defray my educational expenses. While on the job one
day, I encountered an elderly patient who was wandering the halls and repeating
the same word, "money," over and over again, sometimes
mumbling and at other times saying it loudly. I asked about him and was told that
he used to be a pastor and had retired from the work. While in retirement, he
went into slow mental decline and now seems only able to say that one word.
Since he was a pastor, I did not understand why that one word would be "money"
and not "Jesus" or something similar. Someone speculated that when our mental
faculties fail, the last thoughts to leave us tend to be those that were our
greatest focus. These can reflect the things we worry about the most. When our
mental inhibitions disappear, these things come out.
Those who have experience with
social drinking have some understanding of this. There is a saying that when
people drink to excess, they become either happy drunk or angry drunk. This is
because once their inhibitions fall, their basic personality comes to the fore.
Those with a positive view of life express happiness and joy with others. Those
with a negative view show anger and animosity toward others, often blaming them
for their lot in life. Under the influence of alcohol, they will say caustic
things to others, things they would not normally say when sober.
As we age, similar changes can
occur as they did for that pastor. He didn't realize what he was saying, and we
wouldn't either under similar circumstances. Therefore, our ongoing attitude
about life is very important. What we feed into our minds over months, years,
and decades of life will bear a crop in our old age that can elevate our final
years or reduce them to ongoing anger and depression. This is not to say that
depression can be cured by simply being happy. There can be a medical reason
for severe depression that can and should be treated by a physician. That clinical
depression causes us to lose interest in life, lose a desire to eat, and
entertain thoughts of suicide. But continuous anger and bitterness at life and suspicion
of the motives of others, while it may lead us eventually to clinical
depression, is something different. It reflects a problematic negativity that
causes us to relive past hurts, with those painful memories setting up housekeeping
in our minds rent free. These are the kinds of things that rob us of our sleep
as we mentally relive them and the anxiety they caused us. Regrettably, we
cannot change what happened.
Sometimes talking out these
things can help, but what are we to do if the hurts we have suffered prevent us
from trusting anyone to share these hurts with? Fortunately, when we have a
relationship with Christ, we can share it with him. And he is patient. Every
time it begins to trouble us, he is willing to listen and extend grace to us. I
have taken advantage of this many times myself. Some, dealing with horrific
experiences might wonder how I could possibly speak knowingly of their
experiences. I have been to war, and I have experienced unimaginable things in
my life that continue to hurt my thoughts to this day. I understand what a help
it is to be able to bring those thoughts to Jesus and find peace over what has
been troubling me. And when they recur, he is always ready to listen and comfort
me through his grace. It can be very hard, even with Jesus, to bring these
things out to talk about with him, but each time I do, the wounds caused by my experiences
heal a little more.
But acknowledging these things
so I can confront them is only a beginning. The bitterness and negativity that
come from these experiences needs to be released for positivity to take root. In
practice, this means no longer looking at every relationship with mistrust because
others have hurt me so. Instead, when people do things that seem hurtful or
that I do not understand, I want to assume they are doing it from a good place,
that their motives were not to hurt me, but to help. To be sure, there will be
times I am wrong, and others will disappoint, but the price I pay mentally is
far greater if I decide not to trust anyone based on my experiences with those
few. With over seven billion people in the world, if a handful betray my trust
over my lifetime, that is a statistically insignificant sample to support the idea
of never again trusting others.
Jesus knows the importance of this
and spoke of it. He said, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to
the full." (John 10:10, NIV) Too many preach God as eager to judge us and sweep
everyone into hellfire. But this is an attempt by some to impose on God their
own ideas of religiosity and vengeance against their enemies. John, the
disciple who understood Jesus best, told us it is not like that at all. He
wrote, "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but
to save the world through him." (John 3:17, NIV) This can be hard for us to
accept when our life is based on attributing evil to others and believing God
has the same feelings toward them as we do. I once had a woman tell me during a
Bible study, "If God is not going to destroy my enemies, then I want nothing to
do with him." She refused to go any further with the idea that God is loving. She
wanted the God who would kill those who were sinners, overlooking that we are
all sinners.[i]
If we look at the story of Noah
and the Flood in Genesis, only eight people survived the deluge. They were
arguably the best God could find, and yet their flaws soon became apparent. If
we bring that story forward to see what Jesus had to say, he told us that things
will become like they were in Noah's day again,[ii]
perhaps worse, because he doubted he would find any faithful.[iii]
If God were the kind of being who would do as this woman asked to be done to
her enemies, not one of us, including her, would survive. But this is the
essential message of the gospels. Despite overflowing evil in the world, God is
intent on reaching into the flames and to pull all who would out of the fire. I
know from experience that he is more than willing to do this. While I was a child,
he reached into a family plagued with alcohol, dysfunctionality, and abuse and
found a young boy ready to open their heart to other possibilities. My youngest
sister says he did that for her, too.
An experience like that requires
us to admit that what we have isn't working. That can be hard to do because dysfunctionality
works at some levels. For instance, people who steal cars or deal drugs learn
that there are rewards for those activities and are willing to chance everything
crashing down around them for those rewards. If they can buy things that will
cause others to envy or admire them for what they have, it is hard to submit to
the humility of a life in Christ without those things. It does not help that
there are many others who are happy to give them every reason not to turn to
Christ. But those who base their lives on such material things are in constant
fear of losing them. This is especially true if they are in the habit of
imputing evil motivations to others. When the negativity gets to be too much to
handle, some will self-medicate with alcohol, drugs, or whatever will get the
endorphins flowing, and this works after a fashion until the inevitable downer
that follows. Been there, done that.
My life has been seventy years
of struggle. At first, as a child and then a young man, I thought my job was to
succeed in the struggle and overcome those things challenging me. But over
time, I learned I was not strong enough for that. As the years turned into
decades, I came to lean more and more on the love, compassion, empathy and presence
of God in my life. This is not to say that I have become perfect, far from it. But
I have learned that joy does not come from owning things. Neither does it come
from winning. It comes from surrender and a willingness to accept change in
life as God molds my character both directly and through others to bring me
ever closer to Eden where humanity was originally made in the image of God. We
have so much to relearn and such short lives to learn it in.