Cynical Contentment

I’m sitting in one of my favorite places, and it’s pretty empty, which is rare these days and makes it feel all the more restful today. The sun, an hour later than usual, is just peeping over the building next door and blinding the few of us that are in here, but none of us minds today because the weather is nice and the morning is quiet. Everyone is wearing their extra hour of sleep in different ways but it’s a strange kind of nice to have that shared experience connecting all of us strangers and breathing an unusual sense of camaraderie into the air.

I’ve got head phones in and I’m listening to an album that sounds a lot like moving on and leaves you feeling refreshed and and a little lighter upon it’s end. I don’t know why I don’t play it more often. I’ve started writing down my prayers because just thinking them or saying them lately has left me feeling disconnected, but writing never does. I forgot I wrote on the last page of my notebook last night, so there was no space to jot down those things today, and so here we are, me writing and processing in my own way and perhaps you reading it.

People have challenged me recently, and no one has challenged me more so than the Spirit himself in his gentle and kind way, to start asking God for what I desire and hope for. I’ve dragged my feet for a while on that one and hemmed and hawed my way through several months now. It’s not that I think God’s not listening, I’m just more cynical than I like to admit, and I have this idea that if I actually ask for what I want, that’s the moment the Big Man Upstairs will snatch it away. I’ve got all the right answers for you, and I would tell others how backwards that theology is, but there it is in the solitude of my own home, when I sit down to pray, this strange sense of self protection. Keep it surface level. Only go deep with the things you can control. Don’t let him see that side of you, he’ll surely demolish it.

I started listening to a sermon series on shame last week, and some things struck a deep and painful chord with me. The kind of chord you don’t really want in your song because it screws up the melody. Yeah, that chord. I decided to give this whole “asking for your hopes” thing a try this week in the smallest way, and even as I wrote it down, I felt it. I reread the sentence that felt more like a diary entry to me than a prayer, and there was Shame, quietly curled up beside me. She reached out and not so gently tugged at my arm the way Juniper does when she wants my attention. The accusations were immediate, the ones that tell me I’m undeserving and unworthy and perhaps worst of all, the ones that tell me I’m silly. That’s an interesting word to me. We use it because it’s supposed to be harmless, but it sits in the heart in a not-so-harmless way that scratches and claws and clings, but maybe that’s just me being...well...silly. Either way the accusations come, and accusations have this tricky way of turning into lies that tell you things like the Lord doesn’t want to give you good things and he gets some kind of twisted pleasure from holding out on you, and ultimately the Lord doesn't want you, period.

It’s funny — I’ve written a lot here about the Goodness of the Lord and I think it is sometimes easier for me to see that in the suffering than in the good times. It’s easier for me to trust him with my trials than it is to trust him with my hopes. I have striven for contentment and believed I achieved it, but there is a rot in my contentment that reeks of disbelief. I am content - if I don’t ask. I can trust him with my lack, but I can’t trust him with my want and I think this is a trap into which a lot of us fall.

It looks a lot like holiness, but it boils down to a lack of trust and a desire for control. If we don’t ask for the thing, then we can’t be disappointed with the Lord when we don’t get it. It’s a way of protecting ourselves and protecting our relationships with the Lord. It’s a tragedy, really, because the Jehovah of the bible is the one who held hopes firmly in his hands and cared for them. The one who promised a ninety year old woman a lineage of redemption. The one who saw Hannah’s weeping and had compassion on her. The one who made a shepherd boy into a king and made a paralyzed man walk. Hopes are safe in him, but it requires us to let go of the very thing we hope for so he can take it and mold it into what is best.

Keep doing the work — and it is work — and I trust that he’ll be faithful and that the depths of his love will be all the more tangible because of it. The road will be rocky and winding and full of felled trees in the middle of the path. Stay true anyway, and don't walk it alone.  At the end of the road, Hope itself bends down to meet us, reaching out across the depths and carrying us to the place where hopes are forever and completely fulfilled and lack loses its meaning.