It is such an obvious part of our lives one would think, you know, that we’d at least be aware of it. “It” is our propensity to come to believe that what we receive becomes what we are owed. Our expectation of a normal life, what is our due, our baseline of decency was formed as we grew up. And like our waistline as we grow older, it grows out.
Another Era
I was born in 1965. I never knew a moment when we didn’t have multiple bathrooms in our home, when cold weather meant a cold night’s sleep. I never once went to bed hungry because the cupboards were bare. That said, I remember when we got our second color television. I remember being in late grade school the first time we had a car with air conditioning and being in junior high school before our family added a second car to the fleet. My upbringing was decidedly middle-class but a middle class that was far more frugal than today’s middle class.
Greener Leeks
When we forget from whence we came, or worse, romanticize it as the greener grass we show ourselves to be just like the children of Israel in the wilderness. How easy it is for all of us, reading of their grumbling and complaining to grumble and complain at them, rather than recognizing ourselves in them. We want to go back to Egypt, because our broadband provider is having technical difficulties and we can’t get our Netflix on on our 70-inch flat screen.
1%
I write, however, not to rebuke, but to invite. Wouldn’t we be so much better off not if we got everything we wanted but were surprised for everything we already got? Isn’t gratitude the antidote to the grumbles, the anxiety, the temptations, the frustrations that come with inflated expectations? Isn’t it better, wiser, more biblical to change our mindset rather than changing our circumstance? To put it another way, don’t we need to learn to not just abound but to be abased (Phil. 4:12)? We might start by realizing that what we call being abased is what literally 99% of the people who ever walked the planet would call abounding. When we find a way to grumble while being the 1%, we know that the solution is not to prosper more so that we become the .01%.
Gratitude
God is not just the giver of every good gift (James 1:17) but is good. He doesn’t cheat us. He doesn’t torment us. He gives us precisely what is best for us. That might be, for our neighbor, far more than what is best for us. It might be far less than what we are accustomed to. But He knows what He is doing. What He is doing is calling us to gratitude, to thankfulness, to trust Him and to glorify Him. No matter how prosperous we are, if our expectation is that we should be 10% more prosperous we will feel poor and discontent. No matter how “poor” we might be, if our expectation is that we should be 10% less prosperous, we will feel rich and content. Lord, teach us all to give thanks, for You are good to us all.
