For a few years while living in Washington State I would spend a day and a night a month in a cottage on the Hood Canal with a few priest friends. We’d relax, pray, and talk about our lives and ministries. We were a very diverse group in every way, including temperamentally and theologically. It was interesting to observe how our theologies were informed by our general overall outlook. One of us reminded me of Eeyore from the Winnie the Pooh stories (which I delight in reading to my daughters). He’s a stuffed mule with a perpetually downcast expression and a voice that just brims over with resignation. He expects the worst and is always surprised when something good happens to him. So it was with my (favorite) colleague from the Hood Canal retreat days. I remember his first Easter at his new parish so well. “How’d it go?” I asked him later in the day over pizza with our wives (yes, pizza for Easter dinner; don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it). “Well,” he replied (sounding VERY Eeyoresque), “I had about 500 at my main service. But there was this guy at the back who read the Seattle P-I during my sermon.” He was actually quite despondent about it and was only able to celebrate the splendor and positive energy of the day after some vigorous cheering up by the rest of us. Some of this is just human nature and the result of thousands of years of evolution. I read recently that the average person has about 60,000 thoughts a day, and they are mostly anxious, worrisome ones. And pretty much the same ones every day. Apparently, as the theory goes, we are the descendants of the most cautious, anxious specimens of homo sapiens. The ones who didn’t risk encounters with wooly mammoths and therefore had a higher survival rate! Some of this is about attitude and even spirituality. Stephen Covey, a prominent life coach and consultant and best known as the author of Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, summed up two competing perspectives in words that I have heard repeatedly around the church in the context of stewardship discussions: Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. And if someone were to get a big piece of the pie, it would mean less for everybody else. The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life. People with a Scarcity Mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit – even with those who help in the production. They also have a very hard time being genuinely happy for the success of other people. The Abundance Mentality, on the other hand, flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity. The Rev. Mr. Eeyore was a gifted priest but under the spell of scarcity. You might say he had trouble taking ‘yes’ for an answer. He might have been happy to see a man in church who was honest about his ambivalence, yet still present and possibly hearing something he needed to hear about the Resurrection. The “payoff” for expecting the worst is that it gives the Eeyores of the world a feeling of control amid a life that is so full of variables that it is impossible to predict with certainty what will come next. We fear uncertainty more than adversity. If you don’t believe that, think of all the people you’ve ever known who were waiting for the results of a cancer biopsy. Even when it came back positive, the emotional cost of the bad news was still less than the turmoil created by fantasizing about all the possible tragic scenarios. As Ben Franklin said, “I expect the worst, so that I may be pleasantly surprised.” I always say: “I have high hopes and low expectations.” You have a choice: believe that every day you walk upon the face of the earth is a gift and a miracle, and God is creating and sustaining you and this universe moment to moment. Then let your life today be an expression of gratitude and trust. “So do not worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. There is no need to add to the troubles each day brings.” – Matthew 6:34 Abundantly yours (for the moment), Randy
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 03:30:05 +0000
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