You give your best to those who don’t care about you and you give your worst to those who do care about you deeply.

How much of our lives is spent giving the best of ourselves to people who don’t love us back, and who maybe aren’t even in our God-prescribed limited sphere of influence? Near strangers at work who we long to impress, people in casual social circles whose lives we covet deeply, people online who we don’t really know at all? And how much of our lives then ends up giving the people who love us the most, the very worst versions of ourselves?

Katie is a helper, but she is also really little, and so her helping is sometimes, um, not all that helpful. In fact, when she helps with things, it usually means that those things will need to be done twice, and so my temptation is to not include her at all. One of the places she loves to help is with the cooking. She slides a chair into the kitchen to stand on, she throws her favorite kid’s apron on, and she insists on doing things that she really isn’t capable of doing. It usually leads to a bigger mess than is necessary and more stress expenditure than was budgeted for in my emotional checking account, but it is worth it for the sense of purpose, joy, adventure and participation that it brings her. I love it when she helps, even though it isn’t all that helpful.

In short, I feel a little exasperated as I sit down to write this.

Why is the world so busted? Is there truly a way to live in the tension of the now and the not yet Kingdom of God without giving into empty platitudes or cold-hearted decrees?

So, I am asking the Lord for His help, for help to face the world as it really is, and as I have been sitting here I believe that He has given it. I just remembered that today is actually a significant day in the church calendar. Today is Ascension Day, the day that comes forty days after Easter Sunday, when we remember that the resurrected Christ ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father.

The bible is full of instructions around thanksgiving. We are commanded to be thankful, and I think it is in part because thankfulness is very good for us. It right sizes current obstacles, and it reminds us of the faithfulness of God through our past, which provokes us to trust Him with our unknown futures.

All the while, I am all too aware, that the reality of the world and my experience of it is now, in front of me, making up the substance of my life through a series of present tense happenings, or as Annie Dillard famously and rightly said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”  Said another way, our life is the net result of billions of “nows” where we have the opportunity to be present to reality, and we also have temptation to escape it by looking longingly, or loathingly, either forward or back.

It isn’t lost on me that the most discouraging Sunday in church ministry is often the Sunday after Easter, as auditoriums and parking lots return to normal and as people’s sense of the reality of Christ’s resurrection seems like a distant memory.

Part of this discouragement is because we do measure the wrong things and I know that. We usually measure number of attenders, which is an interesting metric, but not a real guage on the impact that the gospel is having on a group of people. But, part of this discouragement is the nagging sense that we know that if we were all really paying attention to the reality of the resurrection, then every Sunday would feel like Easter Sunday. The fact that it doesn’t just shows what a distracted group of people we are.

I love the thought of a God who is prepared to get His hands dirty, to work in the soil of the world, at a task that others don’t really want to do, in order to preserve and promote beauty and flourishing in the world. What a humble King we have in Jesus, one who could be mistaken for a gardener.

As you prepare for Holy Week, it is helpful to remember how Christ Himself prepared for Gethsemane. I can tend to believe that Jesus went to the cross with curses on His lips and frustration in His heart, but nothing could be further from the truth. Though His anguish was indescribable, and His agony unlike any before or since, what came from His mouth was praise for His Father in the form of a song of faith. A song about what is true of God in the midst of deep suffering. A song still true for us today.

Go to counseling. Say “sorry.” Say “I forgive you.” Try to mean it.
Go to counseling again. Repeat.

As recipients of the gospel, we are able to take our hurts to a God who understands pain and so we don’t have to carry it around forever, with the constant risk that one day it will flare up and hurt us or those around us, or both. 

Every single day is an opportunity from God to revel in the love of the son of David. Don’t miss out through pretense.

Every single day is an opportunity from God to marvel at the extraordinarily ordinary means of grace that God gives us in the presence of fellow image bearers. Don’t miss out through judgment.