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People-Pleasing
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. … And without faith it is impossible to please God. – Hebrews 11:1-2 & 6b (NRSV)
All my life, I’ve believed I’m not a people-pleaser.
Then I started paying attention to my emotional relationship with email: The guilt over every message collecting dust for lack of a reply. The assumption of anger in an email’s tone. The avoidance of a message if I cannot immediately meet its need. The projection of disappointment, the perceived obligation to acquiesce, the default of an apologetic tone.
I walk on eggshells around email like it’s my ex-husband: unpredictably volatile, a landmine of overwhelming and unrealistic demands that will explode if not pacified.
Meanwhile, I manage 4 personal inboxes and 5 professional inboxes, which is a lot of ex-husbands to placate.
And here comes Hebrews 11, harboring a dilemma that is intimately familiar to us people-pleasers and fawners: “How can we secure approval from Someone who is impossible to please? How can I be certain Someone is content with me?”
“Faith” is not the answer to our search for certainty that God is pleased. Faith is the mechanism by which we dare to ask, “Does God require pleasing?”
Is not God already pleased? Pleased to set healing before us? Pleased to plant hope within us?
Is not God already abundant in pleasure—in the delights of heaven and earth, in the invisible that waits to unfold?
Eggshells and insecurity are but for a moment. God’s love is for a lifetime. Disappointment may linger for the night, but unrestrained-by-external-expectations joy comes in the morning.
Prayer: Lead us not into anxiety, and deliver us from email.
cross-posted on ucc.org’s Daily Devotional
Testimony
It’s amazing that we survive death.
So much of life should kill us –
heartache, grief, vulnerability, fatigue;
even birth should destroy us with pain
yet it doesn’t, and here we are.
Our hearts break, but no matter: we wake
every morning. Loss takes our breath away;
even so, our lungs inflate, deflate, inflate.
Storms knock us flat, tsunamis wash away
all that we’ve known, and yet: here we are.
It’s amazing that any of us survive
the daily death of disappointment, of dread,
of betrayal every time the world sells you out
for the cheap price of fear. But still:
you’ve loved today, haven’t you? So have I.
And if we know love – within ourselves and
throughout this fragile life; if by some miracle
we even hold the same love for more than a day;
are we not thriving richly against life’s odds?
Is not love a conjugation of life?
Love is the past progressive tense of death.
It is a testimony to life in the present perfect
and the assurance of the simple future.
And when we no longer survive death, as is certain,
the memory of love will remain life’s miracle.
Covenants
Your promises I welcome, numerous and good, but the blamelessness I simply cannot manage. Perhaps, O Perfection, we can come to a different arrangement? I could give you my fear and awe -- easily; my name and faith, too -- several times over; but human things, O...
Sleepless
Tell me, stars, how often God has shown up for you in your cold existence. Over the millennia, how often has God been your renewal, your hope, your reason for being -- or have you died already, unnoticed, your light unrequited? Tell me, tears, if you ever grow tired...
Remembering
Remembering, O Light, that your sign of mercy is my sign of trust, from horizon to horizon, sunrise to sunset, mountains to seas. Taking a deep breath in, letting trust reach down to my toes. Remembering, O Life, that your time of patience is my time of wilderness...
Restraint
The LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” - Genesis 2:16-17 (NRSV) When the new year dawned last month, my social media feed was filled with people saying...
Ashes
Breath by breath, grief by grief, joy by joy, pain by heart-rending pain these fragile ashes turn and return and resign to the Holy, to the Trembling, to the Deep Mystery, to the Heritage of Relentless Love without which these same ashes could only sift and settle...
Stubborn
Most Holy Judge: for what we plainly know but cannot bring ourselves to confront, forgive us and be merciful to those harmed by the fallout. The truth does not need prophets yet you send them anyway, each one an invitation to understand and repent, to make way for...
Tent-Making
Let me pitch my tent by a lamppost in the snow somewhere in a dream of witches and wardrobes and wonders that taste of delight and courage. Let me roll out a heavy tarp under a mysterious new moon resting alongside the wise wind and the patient oak tree, until...
I Cannot Fly
I cannot fly, O God of the soaring eagle; I cannot even leap with a dancer's grace. But today I can wake and I can rise, and perhaps the strong wind will remind me not to be so rooted in fear. I cannot measure up, O God of the starry heavens; I cannot even pretend to...
From One Grasshopper to Another
It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. - Isaiah...
