GRATITUDE AND AWE

(10/27/10)
(Site B53, Linville Falls Campground, Blue Ridge Parkway)

It’s about 9:30pm, and I think the rain has finally passed. A few moments ago as I walked to the restroom, I looked up through the holes torn in the thin blanket of low-lying fog that hung over the campground and saw what seemed like a million stars in a black cloudless sky. It was a sight that was particularly striking to me. We never see that many stars back in the Charlotte metro area. There, as in so many other highly-populated areas, a nightly burglary takes place in the skies above, as our society’s crass, noisy light robs us of a precious treasure – the stunning, delicate beauty of countless stars and galaxies stretched out to remind us just how small we really are. It is a sad depiction of much of our lives on this planet, as we allow the man-made and mundane to drown out the miraculous and majestic.

Tonight I finished reading “Leading With a Limp” by Dan Allender, PhD, who is president of Mars Hill Graduate School in Washington. This book is a thorough, insightful look at the advantages as a leader of acknowledging and even embracing one’s weaknesses. Throughout the book, Allender refers to different pairs of words – some of them contrasting, some of them co-related. I think I want to reflect on a few of them over the next few journal entries, beginning with Gratitude and Awe. Allender introduces the word pair this way:

What exactly does it mean to grow character? Character is grown to the degree that we love God and others. Love that is true and eternal begins with worship of the God who redeems people by his unexpected and unreasonable grace. We grow in character, then, to the degree we are captured by gratitude and awe. (1)

GRATITUDE
In essence, gratitude is the act of being thankful. It is the acknowledgment that someone has given you something or done something nice for you. Allender continues:

I know that every breath, each heartbeat is a gift. Not a single molecule of what I see is deserved or earned. The matchless gifts of my wife, of beauty, of the sun, land, water, and air that surround me make any presumption of ownership or entitlement completely laughable. All is a gift.” (2)

As I have been driving around up here in the mountains over the last few days, I can’t help but be grateful to you, God. Grateful that You created all of this beauty for us to enjoy. Grateful that I am still healthy enough to hike up and down these mountain trails. Grateful that I am wealthy enough to own a reliable SUV to drive up here (my Xterra, “Rex”). Grateful that You know me and hear me and see me and love me and call me to follow You.

Gratitude is recognition of YOUR GOODNESS.


AWE
Allender defines awe like this:

Awe is the capacity to bow in the presence of something or someone more glorious than ourselves. It is the proper posture of a creature before both the Creator and the Creator’s greatness as expressed through creation… We prostrate ourselves before greatness because we were built to admire and honor glory. (3)

Awe is my default response as I gaze at the beauty of these mountains. Awe is almost inescapable up here. On my way up here on Monday, I saw a double rainbow, one of which was perhaps the most brilliant I have ever seen. A few moments later, I saw a complete rainbow as I drove through the town of Linville Falls, NC. Yesterday, I stood at the rim of Linville Gorge and watched as fog rose from the trees and began to combine to form clouds. I have seen trees whose fall colors were so bright, they looked as if they had been set ablaze. And as I sat at my campsite picnic table this morning, I watched and listened as two tiny chipmunks gathered nuts in their cute little cheeks, taking occasional breaks to chatter and chase each other around and up and down the nearby trees. God, You are Creator of both huge and small. As my pastor, David Henderson puts it, “All of this was Your idea.”

Awe is recognition of YOUR GREATNESS.


While gratitude focuses on what You have done for me, awe focuses on what You have done, period. Both are correct responses to You, and both are necessary postures for us as followers of You and as leaders of others. And the absence of either can work to our detriment.

The absence of gratitude is entitlement – the feeling that I deserve or have earned something, and expect it from God. It is the act of exercising and pleading my “rights,” even though I laid all of them down at the cross when I became a follower of Christ. The absence of awe is complacency – the practice of moving through life without looking up; without acknowledging the miracles that we experience every day we live, no matter where we may live.

Gratitude and awe help to keep us both humble and God-focused, as we declare with our lips, heart, and lives that You are God and we are not… that we are finite and You are infinite. As simple and elementary as it may seem, we must always be mindful of one of the first prayers we learn as a child: “God is great… God is good.” Gratitude and awe enable us “to confess daily our desperate need for a greater wisdom and glory than we have today. We will one day apprehend God face to face; today we are given a gracious glimpse of his back. Each encounter with glory stirs a deeper desire for more. Therefore, we are called to be lifelong learners.” (4)

God, forgive me when the pace of my everyday life robs me of gratitude and awe. Help me to focus myself on You – Your goodness and Your greatness.


ENDNOTES:

1. Dan Allender, Leading With a Limp (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2006), 144-145.
2. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 146.
3. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 147.
4. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 148.

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

(10/28/10)
(Rough Ridge, Tanawha Trail System, Blue Ridge Parkway)

It is a new day here in the beautiful North Carolina mountains. The rain is gone, and the sky is that lovely “Carolina blue” (as all the Tarheel fans love to boast), with a few puffy white cumulus clouds and wispy strokes of cirrus clouds brushed across the blue sky canvas. I have climbed to one of my favorite vantage points in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Rough Ridge, a series of rocky outcroppings emerging from the side of a steep slope near Grandfather Mountain. I am perched here on this rock high above the Blue Ridge Parkway enjoying the sun’s warmth on this chilly October day.

In this journal entry, I want to pick up where I left off yesterday, commenting on certain pairs of words that Dan Allender, PhD refers to in his book “Leading With a Limp.” Another word pair that he focuses on is Strength and Weakness. In the chapter about a leader's need to be a character and to grow character, he states:

To be a character requires gratitude for one’s uniquely carved being. Do we delight in the strengths that are fearfully crafted into our characters? Do we bless now these strengths wondrously serve others?... Our calling, however, is often shaped as much by our weaknesses as by our strengths. We tend to run with our strengths and avoid those people and tasks that expose our weaknesses. But the story of God is not a saga of human potential; it is the revelation of the kindness and passion of the Father who seeks and redeems sinners. Therefore our strengths may help us with certain tasks and opportunities, but it is our frailty and sin that make known the glory of God’s story. (1)

We all possess both strengths and weaknesses. Allender refers to us as “glorious ruins, bent glory.” (2) And we must believe that God intended it to be this way. But why? Why can’t we just have all strengths – equally skilled at everything? Well, first of all, that would be really boring! If I was good at everything, where would be the drive to improve, to better myself? If we were all strong in all areas, where would the need be for each other? That brings me to a second reason for strengths and weaknesses. I think that God wants us to depend on others… and on Him. He wants us to realize that we simply can’t do everything – we need each other to accomplish what he tasks us to do.

I am reminded here of Jesus’ reference to the body – how we are all different parts with different strengths and functions, all working together to accomplish a single task. For example, our eyes see an apple on the counter in the kitchen. Our brain confers with our stomach and decides that we want it. Our brain, multiple muscle groups, and the balance centers of our inner ear all work in harmony to get us up from the couch. Our legs convey us to the kitchen, our arm and fingers cooperate to grasp the apple, and our mouth takes a bite of it. I could go on, but the process gets a little messy from that point forward! You get the idea, though.

Since God creates us with predetermined strengths and weaknesses, does that excuse us to work solely in our areas of strength? While a privileged few may enjoy the luxury of doing that, most of us do not have that option. Therefore, we must better ourselves to compensate for our weaknesses, or at least learn to live with them. However, by the same token, we are not asked to deny our strengths, either. God gave them to us for a reason.

Allender’s primary purpose of writing “Leading With a Limp” is to challenge leaders to acknowledge their flaws and weaknesses, to embrace them, and even declare them openly to others at times. Why? Because when God accomplishes the remarkable by using the unlikely, it demonstrates His power and brings Him glory. From “Star Wars” to “Rudy” to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to “Slumdog Millionaire”, filmmakers know the power of an inspiring story featuring an unlikely commoner triumphing against all odds and accomplishing what seems impossible – essentially the David and Goliath story retold over and over again in cinemas across the globe.

STRENGTH
Acknowledging our strengths and working in them demonstrates our gratitude to God. Allender states it this way:

…we must not deny or hide from the reality of our unique dignity. We are made in the image of God, and we are uniquely woven with awesome beauty. We may be remarkably handsome or bright, possess great musical ability or a hysterical sense of humor. We may possess remarkable abilities to encourage others or to read the nuances of relationships. Whatever marks us with glory, we are meant to prize it and use it for the sake of others. (3)

I think that God smiles when we operate to the best of our ability in one of our areas of strength. I think His response would be similar to that of a father, who smiles while watching his child excitedly run to their room with the new crayons he just gave them, and emerge soon thereafter to give him the new piece of art they just created. You can be assured that, no matter the quality of this new “masterwork,” it will be gracing the refrigerator door! God wants us to make full use and bring to full redemptive potential every gift that He provides to us – in fact it pleases Him when we do, as we show our gratitude to Him over and over again by creating art for Him, whether it be a stirring poem, a brilliant invention, or an inventive business marketing plan. (It makes me wonder if God has anyone’s Excel spreadsheets currently tacked to His refrigerator door!)


WEAKNESS
Acknowledging our weaknesses, on the other hand, demonstrates our dependency on God. As Allender says:

… we must also not deny or hide from the reality of our depravity. Each of us has a unique way of hiding shame and blaming others for our failures. We must admit the truth that we are a mess and that we mar everything we do with some stain of the Fall. (4)

We acknowledge our dependency on God by declaring to ourselves and to others that we are not able on our own to accomplish a task for Him. Therefore, when a favorable outcome occurs – when we find success – we can keep no glory for ourselves. It all goes to God. And we must know that God is pleased with that, as well. I can imagine His response being similar to that of a father when his child asks for $5.00 so they can go buy him a present. When the child presents the gift to him, the father is no less touched by the child’s love and devotion, even though he essentially just financed his own gift. That is why we can sing from our souls with worship artist Chris Tomlin, “Not to us, but to Your name be the glory!”


Most importantly, it is central to our faith to remember that God loves us with an all-encompassing love. He loves us when we are victorious, and He loves us just as much when we are frail. He loves us when we beam with confidence and when we shrink in cowardice. He loves us through all the rise and fall and glory and failure and joy and sorrow. His love for us never dims.

As Brennan Manning professes in his amazing book, “The Furious Longing of God”:

… the God I’ve come to know by sheer grace, the Jesus I met in the grounds of my own self, has furiously loved me regardless of my state – grace or disgrace. And why? For His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods – of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender. (5)

And so, we must furiously chase after God, folding together both our strengths and weaknesses as we strive to find and follow His will for us. As Allender says:

We can expect nothing more or less from ourselves and our leaders than to know Jesus better through their brokenness as well as our own. We must demand of ourselves and our leaders to limp and fall forward into the strong arms of grace. (6)

I close with the words of Paul in II Corinthians 12 [speaking at first in the person of God],

9 “…My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. 10 … For when I am weak, then I am strong.

ENDNOTES:

1. Dan Allender, Leading With a Limp (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2006), 149-150.
2. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 162.
3. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 163.
4. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 164.
5. Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook Publishing), 35.
6. Allender, Leading With a Limp, 199.