I said the Thanksgiving prayer this year, though I don’t remember much of what came out.  The BF encouragingly and knowingly squeezed my shaky, sweaty hand, the product of a nervousness that recognizes how family can be the best and worst audience because they remember everything.  Like when you forget your music during your fourth-grade piano recital. Though I don’t know if I conveyed it, the focus of my prayer was on thanking God for all that happened in the past year, the things we call good and even the things we call bad.  Because bad is a word we give to stories we don’t know the ending of yet.  And yet is a place where misunderstanding and resentment can build long-term housing, if we let them.

Thanking him for only the things we deem positive is like making a recipe using only the ingredients that taste good raw.

On Sunday, the BF and I were in Atlanta so we couldn’t go to Redeemer.  We visited another church and I sat in the pew and realized my heart was slowly sinking to my feet.  Visions danced before my eyes…and not of sugar plums.  Rather, a world of Tim Keller-less Sundays.  A return to the church of my youth, with its pithy, alliteratively-bullet-pointed sermons.  The last point of which was just another word that started with R or P, not The Cross. Not Christ and him crucified.  And NOT ONE MENTION OF BILBO BAGGINS.

Good Lord, I thought.  This is hopeless.

You rang? He replied.

My heart began to be counseled with the irony and arrogance of my thoughts:  I was afraid of never finding a church where I feel him like I do at Redeemer, all while sitting in a church and professing hopelessness with him right there.  Taking raw materials into my hands without accounting for the Master Chef’s artistry.  With materials I can and can’t see.

Thanking him can feel insincere, can hurt even, when there’s so much we see that appears to suck:  sickness, job loss, war, hunger.  Or maybe it’s more about what we can’t see and secretly fear will never happen:  healing, provision, redemption, restoration.  We make a commitment when we claim to believe him–to take him at his word that he is actually good despite any evidence we could gather to the contrary.  For better or worse, as far as we can judge either.  And then we hit the downhill slope and look for a tree to hang on to, just so we can stop for a minute and think. Instead of hanging on, we need to be held.  Our shaky, sweaty hands covered and surrounded by the scarred, knowing one.