Gratitude

Last time I talked about a fast I held for several decades.  Was this a result of discipleship or nature?  That is what I want to think about today.

After I became a Christian, I ended up in a Hutterite community for several years.  Certainly, this opportunity turned me from being the incredibly violent person I had been to a very convicted pacifist.  Equally, there must have been other changes in me because of my years with them.  I now had peace.  You have no idea the terror of living every minute in fear – because very dangerous men had decided you must die because you accidentally knew something you should not.  Was my gratitude to God for the miracle of living a month on only nine crackers a day, a result of the peace He had brought me?  Certainly, I had learned my existing from minute to the next was very much dependent upon God alone.

From my Danish great-uncle, whom I credit for whatever is good in me, I learned to view life very uniquely.  I learned to see life not as something we are controlled by but rather to respond to situations with thought.  He was a very wealthy man, but you would not have known it.  Wealth was something you used to help others with, wealth was a tool to better self and others with.  He never had to work a single minute after 1942 when he became wealthy, but he chose to buy a dairy and work at what has got to be one of the harder occupations in life!  Not to save money but because he knew it was good for a man to work.  As for God, he never once mentioned Him to me, maybe I was too young, but after his death I was to learn he had been an active member in the church as well.  Did he teach me Christian values without my knowing?  Gratitude being one of them?  I can definitely see that one!

The fast I observed was not a big deal.  No one knew of it, save for Una and later Gaelic Girl, and only then because we spent so much time together.  They thought it quaint (and perhaps I was a little demented?).  I did not run around whining about hunger or pretend I was better than anyone because of it, because it was something I chose to do to remember God’s miracle in my life.  If someone wanted to do something on that day, which would have involved food, I would reschedule with them – as I had other plans for that day.

So, understand, I judge no one based on my experiences in this area.  But, I do understand gratitude and God’s active hand in our lives.

Thus, when I read Isaiah 58:6-7, I understand intimately what God is saying to the Hebrew of that day, “You are failing me in your hearts!”.

They were fasting but not remembering why they were.  They were in fact, acting in exactly the opposite direction of what they should.  They were to be remembering hunger, yet they would not feed the hungry.  They were to be remembering their poverty and yet they would not clothe strangers – much less their own relatives!  They wore their fasting as a badge of honor – “Look at me!  I am doing the Fast!”  When it would have been so much better to have dealt with their hardness of heart.  They could not see that God was the one feeding them and clothing them.

They had no gratitude.  And very soon, they had nothing - for God took away from them all they thought they had earned by their own hand…..