“If I tried to recite all Your wonderful deeds, I would never come to the end of them.”—Psalm 40:5, NLT
H ad to do a double-take when I saw this bumper sticker in a downtown parking lot, but the more I thought about it, the more I loved this glass half-full quip. Not that I’m always feeling it, or because it tells you to look at the stresses of life through rose-colored glasses, but because it shouts in its own way an essential Christ-one reminder:
When you get dressed in the morning, be sure to put on gratitude.
For a photographer, perhaps the most sickening sound imaginable is that of metal and hard plastic colliding with pavement when the camera strap evades your grasp and slips off your shoulder. It is like being in the midst of typing out an important the-clock-is-ticking document, business proposal, or idea and having the “blue screen of death” appear out of nowhere on your laptop screen.
It was a really beautiful, upbeat Monday morning until both of those things happened while working remotely. And in no time, there was no shortage of nausea, anxiety, sweaty palms, and panic. Life happens, and no matter how long you’ve walked with the Savior of the world, you don’t always respond well...
"When the disciples saw Jesus walking on the water, they thought he was a ghost, and they started screaming."
—Mark 6:49, Contemporary English Version
How quickly a beautiful new day can all unravel on the interior, expecting the worst and not even daring to think about “hey, look at the bright side” because none seems to be in sight. The problem with camping out in the land of negativity, though, is that it tends to magnify the problem—especially the problem that, so far, only exists in your “what if?” mind. I mean, it looks really bad, so it must be, right?…
…“So, the jailer placed them in the innermost cell of the prison and had their feet bound and chained. Paul and Silas, undaunted, prayed in the middle of the night and sang songs of praise to God, while all the other prisoners listened to their worship. Suddenly a great earthquake shook the foundation of the prison. All at once, every prison door flung open and the chains of all the prisoners came loose.”—Acts 16: 24-26, Passion Translation
…Driving back to the office more than an hour away, with all of that negativity still swimming mightily on the inside, I purposed to follow Paul’s and Silas’ lead. Like them, not in a “don’t worry, be happy” sort of way, but with the time-proven reality that verbally expressing gratitude and thanks to God who has got the whole world in His hands—including your own little world crisis of a dinged camera and blue-screen-of-death computer—magnifies His goodness, majesty and power on my insides. Gratitude expressed in the midst of whatever our innermost cell happens to be—situation, decision, conversation—can cause an internal earthquake that sends the swimming negativity elsewhere and replaces it with renewed faith and hope in what and Who really matters after all.
And it was so.
It was a reminder that purposefully recalibrating your thinking and emotions to Who’s got this and Who holds you in the palm of His hand helps put meaningful music to that bumper sticker—and not just on Sunday morning in church. Perhaps, even shouting a little "Joyful, Joyful" Beethoven/van Dyke …”Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away…ever singing, march we onward, victors in the midst of strife.” (Or, perhaps something with more of a groove.)
And even though no one else was in the car that morning, it's good to know that as with Paul and Silas, quite often and though we may not realize it or try to make it happen, that kind of singing in the midst of the hard realities of life can be powerfully contagious. We may never know who’s listening, or their response. Ours is simply to get dressed, put on gratitude, to celebrate God being God even in the midst of strife, and to begin reciting all His wonderful deeds...blissfully knowing that we can never come to the end of the sentence.
Even, and especially when, you drop your camera and die on the inside right along with your laptop.
(Postscript….The diagnosis of the camera: not fatal after all. The diagnosis of the laptop: “seems to be fine—just a computer behaving badly.”)
“Worship is about magnifying the right things. It can be so easy to let the struggles of this life become all-consuming, and we must not ignore them. But, when we worship, instead of magnifying and focusing on those things, we magnify and focus on the Name, the strength, the power, the grace of Jesus. When we do that, it puts everything into perspective.”
—Matt Redman
