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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.
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