6. Called to be Grateful

6. Called to be Grateful

Matthew 18:20 “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them."

If you are desiring an orderly progression of posts starting at a fundamental basis and progressing to a profound, semi-profound, okay, mild amusing conclusion you are expecting something of me that my mind cannot produce.  I also think, theology is not linear, we can only progress a bit here, and then a bit there, and another piece here.  It is the fact that the bible is obscure and contradictory in places that lends it credence to me.  To think that we could write of God and our relationship with him in a single stream of thought is indeed arrogant.

Today I want to write of my gratitude.  I believe we are called to be grateful.  To provide some clarity I do see gratitude as being different than being joyful.  Being joyful for me is simply the response to God being with my life.  Gratitude is seeing my life, with all its victories and defeats, warts and bruises, successes and triumphs and realizing that all not only serve the greater glory of God, but also that he has used them to make me a better person.

I am immensely grateful that I am an addict and alcoholic.  Even more so that I am clean and sober.  Thus, I owe an immense debt of thanks to Narcotics Anonymous.  My experience within that twelve step program has shaped my understanding of God and my relationship to him.  Most profoundly was my understanding that God is not a solitary experience, God can only be experienced with others.

There are moments of profound realization and insight that occur when I am alone.  But God really is experienced when you and I come together without pretense, without agendas, but simply come together in his name.  Nowhere have I experienced this as profoundly as in the fifth step “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

This was my woman at the well moment. 

I wish it had been more dramatic.  The stories of the fifth step rival the conversion stories told in churches.  People report experiencing emotional breakthroughs, cathartic episodes, people report that their lives are changed forever, that it is like spring cleaning when mom would open the windows and scrub down the entire house.  Thus is the reputation of the fifth step. 

Like my coming to Jesus my fifth step was pragmatic, and almost anticlimactic.  It was step that I knew that if I wanted long term abstinence that I needed to do.  I also had a clear agenda.  As I had been Christian for most of the time that I had used drugs and alcohol, I was sure that I had pissed God off and I was going to hell at the end of this life. 

So I wrote out all the things I had done that I thought merited damnation.  Then with my list I went to see the pastor of the church that I had attended sporadically through my addiction.  I sat there and after we had prayed I shared my list, and we chatted.  It was an excruciating experience.  Even today I can feel the shame of a life wasted by addiction, of behaviours fueled by the abuse I witnessed at home, and in my drug use.  I laid out what I had done without benefit of excuse or explanation. 

When we finished the pastor looked at me, and said.  “I wish more people in our church would do this.” We then prayed.

After this I walked out to my bike. It was raining; it would be a wet ride home.  After I got home I prayed again, and then went out to a meeting.

There was not the huge relief I had been looking for; I don’t think there was any to be found.  Today I see that God in his kindness allowed none, I was looking for a different drug.  But I found myself happier, less embarrassed as to who I was, less likely to become angry to scare you.

Today, and so many days later, I am truly grateful for that experience.  It was one of the experiences that has allowed me not seek the relief of intoxication.  It has allowed me to share myself with others at a more profound level.  Everything on that list, and it was a list of my deepest and darkest secrets, I have shared with other people.  And for each item on that list I am grateful for, as that has formed the unique person that I am.

So kind of a convoluted path to gratitude.  But the path really is realizing that there is nothing that we have done that is so awful, evil, perverted, or sinful that God cannot use that in victory with you and with other people.