“Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, KJV
I could’ve just posted the quotation and gone on about my too-busy life. I’ve done it before. Since this week has seen me struggling physically, it would’ve been understandable.
And who really reads any of this anyway, right?!
But, no, I was taking some serious time working on this piece today. After all, I haven’t posted anything in a week or so, and even then, it wasn’t really writing.
So in between doing what I had to do, I was typing a bit here and there, looking for the right links, finding the right names, reworking the sentences I’d written, so they’d flow just right.
I was trying to find the right words to express it because it centers around a powerful principle that has been working on me for a while now — even before I chose Thankfulness as my intention for this year. And only today was my understanding integrating; all the threads were seeming to weave themselves together.
And then — BAM — in an instant, the page timed out, the (infernal) internal error message loaded, and all of my beautiful words were gone.
My eyes grew wide, and my indignation began to expand.
I may not be the sharpest, but I’m no dummy. I’ve lost work before (a whole page I was laying out for a Sunday-morning edition one time — about a half-hour before deadline!!) and don’t usually leave myself open to it anymore. Ctrl+S is my friend, let me tell you.
So I’d been saving and previewing all day.
I spent some time watching Scooby Doo, reading Dora the Explorer, and sorting shapes into the Cookie Jar, then came back to my piece for a couple of minutes.
I got Kevin to help me level the kids’ bookshelf on the uneven floor and got the remainder of their books out of the box; then, I came back to my piece for a few.
I graded quizzes that should’ve been returned by now and created a grading rubric for a writing assignment, making my way back to my piece a little.
I searched for (and found!!) the perfect iced-tea recipe and followed it AND posted a review; then, I came back to my piece just a bit.
I redid the refrigerator shelves to make room for the extra-large pitcher I hadn’t realized wouldn’t fit, and — you guessed it — came back to work a little more.
I could go on and on, but I believe the picture is well-painted. I spent a lot of time that I really didn’t have to spend on writing this thing that was now completely GONE! It was sooo unfair!
And as I sat there, feeling cheated by Life, Time, and WordPress, having my little pity party, the irony hit me: Even in this I must give thanks.
See, I’d spent all those stolen moments all morning and into this afternoon thinking and writing about Corrie ten Boom, living in that horrid concentration camp dormitory room with all of those fleas, learning through her sister’s insistence on following God’s word completely that even those nasty little blood-suckers had a purpose: We’re supposed to thank God even for the fleas!
This principle had been working inside me seriously since last summer when I reread ten Boom’s autobiography, The Hiding Place, in which she details her and her family’s helping the Jews in her native Holland during the Holocaust.
Not only have I made giving thanks a regular part of my day, but also in the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new “God” song about being thankful (“even for the fleas”). Here’s a snippet of it so far:
“It’s so easy to thank God
when everything’s nice, when everything’s right.
We thank Him for the trees and the flowers,
the wealth and the power,
but when everything starts to sour…”
Seriously. You’d think I’d have learned a little bit of this lesson by now. But no. When I lost my little piece of writing, it was like my world fell apart. Pouty and pissed off, I was far from thankful.
And, to make it worse, even after my realization of the irony of it all, it took me quite a while to be okay with it, let alone feel thankful for it. Apparently, my skull’s a little too thick? Or maybe I’m just too much of a whiner? There’s no wonder why this is my lesson-to-be-learned of late!
Well, here goes: Thank you, God, even for my WordPress GUI that locked up and lost my precious words. And thank you for helping me to realize that my words aren’t really so precious, that (as I wrote in my last “God” song a couple of months ago):
“When I feel like giving up,
and when I take pride in what I’ve done,
it’s a travesty of your majesty…”
© 2009 – 2011, mrshawke-dot-com.
Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
