Gratitude #6: 25 things impervious to life's shaking ... for now
The more we learn about the coronavirus, the more parts of the body it seems to affect — and the pandemic’s impact on life as a whole seems to work in a similar fashion. Work, health, community, worship: All taken down (or at least significantly threatened or altered) in one fell swoop. Today I can add to that list housing.
As Tim Keller noted in a recent devotional on Psalm 11, we’re not the first generation to feel life’s foundations shake beneath us. But thankfully, the shaking itself doesn’t move your true foundation.
And yet, how much work it can take to remember that! The fear surges instinctively. Trust takes discipline.
With stress increasingly make itself palpable — whether in heart rate, breathing, muscle tension or other physical disruption — gratitude feels more important than ever. So today, I’m going to write more of a flash-fiction style list.
1. I’m breathing.
2. I can still smell — everything from this morning’s coffee to the beets I accidentally charred in the microwave yesterday. The good news: this hopefully means I’m still uninfected.
3. The sun came up.
4. The sun is actually shining this week, unlike the overcast skies we had much of last week.
5. The cutting I brought back from California is sending forth its sixth new leaf, a hopeful sign as I face another transplantation in a few weeks.
6. I can see the leaf, without any issues — a gift I learned to appreciate more deeply during my decade-plus at a health-care non-profit.
7. Said company let me go on good-enough terms that I’m back temporarily for some contract work. It’s good to have some employment (and remote, at that!) as I figure out what’s next for writing up my singleness research.
8. Going back to work I’ve done before means familiar relationships and subject matter. Though I don’t exactly turn to Medicare daydreams when I want to lift my thoughts, there’s a certain ease in resuming some prior duties, rather than trying to learn something new.
9. I didn’t have to grind my coffee this morning. It looks like Costco won’t have working grinders for a while, but I’m grateful I could grind this bag before they ceased that service. Less noise and fewer steps to get my morning brew? I’ll take every day of that that I can get.
10. I had food to eat this morning — in fact, several options. (Today I chose only the chocolate zucchini bread and quick-cook steel cut oats — thank you, Costco!)
11. I didn’t just have food to eat, but sweetness with it, too. Though I continue to need real discipline with my finances, I’m grateful I could afford to buy two bags of on-sale Craisins for a little burst of fruit in my breakfast.
12. I can still taste such sweetness, related to that blessedly undisrupted sense of smell I mentioned.
13. I can breathe deeply, if I want to.
14. Though the time sometimes weighs on me heavily (part of the pandemic’s toll for singles and those who live alone), I have no lack of room in my schedule to spend time reconnecting with God — the practice I know will do more for my stress than anything else (though a hug would help, too).
15. I can read the Bible — both a gift of literacy and translation. I met people during my singleness research who lacked both those things. Some hadn’t been taught to read; others didn’t have all of the Bible in their own language.
16. I can still hear the church bells I mentioned last time, even though I’ll need to find a different neighborhood soon. Today’s noon music began with several bells of a favorite Easter hymn — “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” — the first time this year I’ve heard it.
17. Despite the church’s many divisions and the fact I probably couldn’t take communion at a Catholic service, shared songs like that provide a welcome reminder of the whole, single body the universal church will someday entail.
18. My back hurts, which means I’m strong enough to stand here, typing — again, something some of those I met on my trip couldn’t say — and have an intact internal warning system for poor posture and other ergonomic failings.
19. I have a laptop to type on and, as of today, an Internet connection. Though the machine’s about eight years old, it continues to work, providing job-critical support for my main source of income.
20. I have an almost-free desk to work on, although the bulk of my furniture remains in a California storage unit. (As I think I mentioned in a review of Secondhand for Christianity Today, I was able to cut up a broken futon frame, making a basic clothing shelf-cum-standing desk with one half.)
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21. My housemate has a miter box, which allowed me to assemble said work/storage station although my own tools also remain in storage.
22. And my housemate let me repurpose some boards to make the shelves for my clothing bins.
23. I have the freedom — and relative quiet — to take a nap soon, something I know a lot of my friends with young kids cannot do as easily.
24. Whether or not I’ll totally drop off, my body still generally sleeps pretty well, aside from occasional melatonin help. I’m grateful I don’t have to deal with something like sleep apnea.
25. Which reminds me: despite the ongoing parasite issues that I’m hopefully close to resolving (yeah: papaya seeds!), I’ve enjoyed remarkably good health despite my extensive travels and all the things I likely ingested or breathed on the road.
As Nina Simone sings in her cover of that Hair song: “I’ve got life.”
Why gratitude, again?
Thinking back on this list later in the day, it occurred to me that fear focuses us on loss, threats and self-protection, whereas gratitude helps us on focus on what we have … fostering contentment and even generosity.
I’m less apt to think of a healthy body as “privilege,” but either way, I’ve received a better lot in life than many. I didn’t earn and don’t deserve that, any more than my friends with chronic illness or the disabled people I interviewed are responsible for their greater challenges.
As a Christian, I think that’s part of why God calls his people to serve others — giving from our (possibly excess) energies to help those who either received less or can do less right now. To paraphrase a one-time pastoral intern of mine, Kyle Brooks, serving others may be one way God calls us to a distribution problem (however much we tend to things as a provision problems).
And, now, perhaps, I should think about those long-delayed nine masks to finish … Ahem.