Invisible Gifts

 photo credit:  Heidi Saylor

During this month of presents, of gift buying, of list making my mind has been wandering...unable to focus on gifts I should buy or things that we need.

As I try to make the list of gifts...ideas...things that are so "you", so "them" my mind revs up and then quickly, ever so quickly, it collapses into a pile under the weight of the sadness...the shame I feel for never appreciating or even noticing the mountain of gifts I already have and that I'm always, always making more lists of things I think I need or think you do.

The burden of these thoughts as I hold my pen over the Christmas list is so heavy it forces my head down to the table where I sit...grieving my greed.

Living in a country like this one has wrecked that part of me that used to be tee-totally convinced I needed things.  And while I don't want to come across as cured from this curse of materialism and self-centeredness, I also need...oh God, I need to get this pressure off my chest...to remind myself in writing, the best way I know to talk to my soul that

I

have

all

I

need.

Oh why not dig deep, grab onto the truth, and rip it out, bloody, pointy root and all?  While I'm at it, why not?

The hard cold truth is this...I have more than I need.

This year I'm asking God, flat out begging Him to make me thankful.

To forgive me for all the times I sat in a doctor's waiting room with my fancy insurance card in my wallet, my name next on the paper, clip-board list, and got annoyed if I wasn't seen fast enough by the terrific doctor waiting to cure me or my children.  Health care.  Great doctors.  Those are gifts and yet never no never, not once did I remind myself or my children in the waiting room of a doctor's office of the gift we have been given, and how mothers all over the world will sit today with a baby who has fever or diarhea and worry...alone...with no doctor.  They will worry, wide-eyed, panicked, sick with fear, biting the inside of their cheek, I've seen them do it...afraid that they will lose another child. While I complain that my appointment was at 2 and it's 2:45 and I've yet to be taken to an exam room, a mother will hold her dead baby tonight and wail...oh how she'll wail at the injustice...

Never once did I sit with a sick child in a waiting room of a doctor's office and whisper the words, "Thank you God for this shiny plastic card in my wallet with a group number on it that means my baby will live." Never once did I walk away from a pharmacy praising God for lavish provision.

I'm asking God to forgive me for how many times I came home from the grocery store griping about the lines or how the lighting in the store causes all four of my children to need to go number two at four different times.  Why couldn't your urges to poo all hit on aisle 6 when we're close to the bathroom?  Why?  Dear God how can you see the mother in Haiti who will never in her life buy as many dollars worth of groceries as I did in one week, and at the same time, like on a split screen, see me and my ungrateful heart huffing and stomping away from the grocery store with a basket overflowing with groceries, and thoroughly de-pooed children...how can you see those two scenes and not open the ground and swallow me up?

Never once did I get back in the car after putting all my junk in the trunk...the pounds and pounds of meat and cheese....and declare at the top of my lungs...with whoops and a Texas sized "Yee-haw" the goodness of the Lord.  I forgot to say thank you.  I forgot to tell my monkey children that we are blessed.  Beyond belief.  Blessed.  A weekly trunk load of food is a gift so grand that most people in this world would never know how to dream it.

I'm asking God to forgive me for how many times my children came in the kitchen, hot and sweaty, returning from an hour of magic and mischief outdoors and I handed them a glass of water right out of the tap and never once, got down on my knees, close to their all-boy-smelling faces, looked them in their little eyes and told them the truth, "clean water is a gift."  God please...oh please forgive me for how many times I gave my children a glass of water and never once thanked you for what wasn't in it or worried about that water one bitty bit.  Are there invisible microorganisms in this glass that will kill my babies?  That thought never crossed my mind.  Giving a glass of water was not a game of Russian roulette.  It was routine.  As a matter of ridiculous fact, water was crap in our house.  "Drink water" translated to "my mom hates me".  The offer of clean, non-deadly water would make my kids cry.  Water was not good enough.

Never once did I pour my family a glass of clean water, stop, and declare that this glass of non-contaminated nothing juice is one of the sweetest, rarest treasures on the Earth. 

I could go on and on....and believe me...I have.  In those secret places in my heart that only God can see and hear.  I have moaned and bawled and told Him I'm sorry a thousand times.

I want to be different.  There I said it.  I'm so sorry for never saying thank you for those things.  For never knowing I should say thank you...for.the.love...I should have said thank you.  Why didn't I say thank you?  This year as I make resolutions and long to be free from the sins that plague me, entangle, and trap me, I'm making a new list.  The list of gifts to buy...the little things I don't have...that list made me tired and a little sick.  I can't look around my neighborhood and make that list.  My ingratitude makes me queezy and for the first time in my life afraid.  Scared.  Fearful of the person I am, and shocked by how tightly greed and gluttony have wrapped themselves around my soul and won't seem to let go.

I got out a clean paper and sat down to make a new list.  This time my heart was filled with joy and hope...and I asked God to help me be thankful....to remove the heavy, black out shades that sit on my eyes that keep me from seeing what I already have.  Help me to be thankful for the gifts that are already mine....so vast and so many that no bottom of a Christmas tree could contain them.  Oh help. Help me to see there is no room under the tree for more.  If I could wrap up water, my home, health care, freedom, and peace I could decorate the underneaths of an entire forest of evergreens with all the gifts that are already mine.

I want my children to hear me say thank you for our house, for clean water, for food, medicine and doctors and the money to afford them.  Those things are gifts that very few in this world enjoy.  Without a single present under a Christmas tree, we have already been generously and graciously given more...oh I can't even explain how much more...than most people.  And while I'm asking God for what seems to be too grand of a make-over...to teach this thankless heart to be thankful...I'm just going to go ahead and ask Him for one more seemingly impossible request.

Could you help me God to be thankful so that I can be more generous?  Could you, oh could you teach me that there is this sad, oftentimes unnoticed and unconfessed relationship between my desire for more and more and the amount of kids that sleep in the street in Haiti and the number of people who get to hear the gospel, or live past the age of five?  Could you help me to see these things are connected?  My Christmas list and teen moms in a third world country are all intricately intertwined?  My lust means someone's loss?

I know...that's a lot God, a huge project to undertake...since I swear, every cell of me seems to be infected....but please, I'm begging you, holding on tightly to the hope in the angel's words to Mary..."nothing is impossible."

Please.  Oh please.