students of jesus

Sometimes thankfulness is difficult because we are so angry we’re not God. I’ve never told him directly, but I think God is aware: I’m after his job.

Perhaps before we examine the cosmic example we can see this idea in operation at elementary school. Yesterday I told my daughter this was a short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. “Isn’t that great, Sweetie?” I said. “You get three days off from school this week!” Her response tells the story in miniature: “Why don’t we get four?”

Or five? Or while we’re at it, why not take off from Thanksgiving to Christmas? My daughter would say, “It works for me.”

This is an elementary school version of what C.S. Lewis described as turning away from the good offered because we are searching for the good we imagined. Take a moment and listen to Lewis:

One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.

Lewis goes on to suggest that deep joy is found when we dive into the wave God sends us, instead of resisting that wave while looking for another. Anything else is fighting the ocean itself.

Ask Yourself: Can I remember a moment when I missed the good God sent because I had in mind another good?

Live Into It: It’s a surprisingly strong habit: we stand in judgment of the good we receive because we would prefer to rule the world ourselves. Although we may never say it so bluntly, we want to be our own god. Why not surrender your crown to the true king?

Here's the deal: Today is my 58th birthday, and I honestly thought I'd be able to steal away for an hour and post something thoughtful for "30 Days . . ."

But my loved ones have overwhelmed me with love, affection, gifts, and food, so much and so many that i haven't had time to sharpen the post I had planned. So I am thankful for the bounty of love I've experienced, and that tomorrow is another day.

If you'd like to celebrate my birthday, I think you should treat yourself to 25 Days of Christmas: A Devotional for Incredibly Busy People.

The kingdom of God has at least five gateways right here and now. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch are daily evidence of the Creator’s kindness and creativity. He floods our senses with his joyful presence, but we have trained ourselves to ignore his always-speaking voice.

Try this: take a moment to re-discover how the goodness of God reaches us. Allow yourself one minute per sense to record how God reaches you. Then share some of your list with us all. Here’s mine:

Sight: The million Kentucky greens, goldfinch yellow and bluebird blue, the hazel eyes of the woman I love, every sunset and the occasional sunrise, double rainbows all the way (“What does it mean?”), and the angels at the very edge of my vision.

Sound: The timbre of my wife’s voice, my children’s laughter, woodpeckers about their morning’s work, the breeze among the trees. Earbuds!—OMG, earbuds! They are a category unto itself: U2, Adele, Mary J Blige, Bach and Bruckner, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriel’s Oboe, and lately, Sara Bareilles.

Taste: French toast, coffee, bacon (see also “smell”), Coca-Cola, butter melting on the biscuit, the salt of the sea and the salt of my sweat, the way hot peppers delay their attack until after you’ve committed yourself all the way.

Smell: Bacon! Firewood—stacked and waiting, the fireplace where our family gathers, the leather of my baseball glove, Starbucks, that moment as you begin to peel a banana, and my granddaughter’s hair just after bath time.

Touch: Hot showers, a subtle breeze, my lover’s kiss, the chill of ice, the drowsy warmth before I sleep, the way I run my fingertips across the back of my couch whenever I walk through the living room, and petting the dog who fits so neatly on my lap.

What will your list look like? Each sensation is an invitation to praise him anew. All these and ten thousand more: call them evolutionary adaptations if you must, I will call them gateways to his goodness.

On the same day John F. Kennedy’s assassination shocked the world, Clive Staples Lewis quietly slipped out life's back door and proceeded farther up and farther into Aslan’s country. In fact, November 22^nd 2013 is the fiftieth anniversary of the deaths of three significant 20^th Century men: JFK, Lewis, and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). If there were a waiting room somewhere in the afterlife, it would have been a fascinating place that day.

Among these 30 Thankful Days I hope you will permit me an appreciation of C.S. Lewis, my first mentor in following Jesus.

I had been a high-school evangelical for three years when someone handed me a collection of Lewis’ essays, God in the Dock. They changed my life. He's more than the Narnia movie guy: if you have never read C.S. Lewis, you have missed one of God’s great gifts to the church in the last hundred years. God in the Dock was the most formative work of Lewis for me because it captured my heart and my attention. From the Dock I went on to discover the reality of the spiritual realm in The Screwtape Letters, the foolishness of valuing ideas merely because they seem new (The Abolition of Man), and yes, the delight of an extended story of other worlds where Jesus is also on the move. Forty-plus years later, Lewis is my constant companion.

Lewis taught me both the delight and the challenge of following Jesus. He was the Father’s emissary in the process of renewing my mind, and he is still my conversational partner and brother in Christ. The facts of his life are remarkable: losing his mother at an early age, a distant but decent father, the horrors of trench warfare in World War I, an alcoholic brother, an mysterious woman who became something of a shackle in his life, and the unexpected joy of finding Christian love late in his life. And then there's the whole international-fame and selling 50-million books thing. For all of his intellect and fame, he experienced many of the same problems we all face.

The trusted voice of Lewis lingers in my memory as fresh as morning coffee, and from my perch in the Kentucky countryside I’m still on the lookout for a fawn, with an umbrella, carrying parcels.

There’s a unique genius required to celebrate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It is a marvel of the modern world; we should stand in amazement. The bounty of the nation lies before you at a cost of 28 cents. Georgia peanuts. California grapes. Kansas-wheat-turned-flour. To assemble a PB&J from scratch and you would have to drive 5,000 miles.

Pity the fool who cannot see the goodness of God between two slices of bread.

There’s an old joke in religious circles where a guy goes to the grocery store and buys a week’s worth of food. He brings it home and says grace over it all before putting it in the pantry. That way he doesn’t have to waste time thanking God before every meal. He is closer to the kingdom than you might expect. Why not thank God for the food as you wheel the grocery cart to your car? Or, as you unload the bounty of a dozen plastic bags why not praise him for each trip back-and-forth between the car and your kitchen? Our grocery list is a modern hymnal, but we grouse over finding room in the frig. In the words of Louis CK, “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy.”

The great philosophers tell us we must examine our life. Very well—why not start with the wonder of humble groceries? If the unexamined life is not worth living, the unthankful life misses the point. G.K. Chesterton reminds us to start simply: “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” Because readers of Students of Jesus are an advanced group, we can start with three ingredients at once. Peanut butter. Jelly. Bread.