Nov 14

God Bless Us Everyone?

Now is the time of year we “give thanks” for all our blessings, right? Even in the office we tell each other stories about how we celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and family. We talk of our favorite foods, favorite football teams, favorite ways to spend an afternoon, our favorite relatives. How pretty it all is.

We feel good about ourselves when we feel thankful for the abundance in our lives. We feel strong when we take time to share that abundance with others. We feel closer to God when we act God-like and warmly embrace the people in our lives we enjoy most and who enrich us. What do we do with the people we dislike and who dislike us?

What has me thinking is how we will express our thanks to the people who made us wildly uncomfortable this year. Will we only be grateful for azure blue skies with marshmallow clouds? Or will we also see the people who pushed us and demanded more than we could deliver, and who maybe even wrote us off (or who we wrote off) as deserving our gratitude, too?

Oh, I don’t mean the kind of gratitude that comes out like mock magnanimity. “I’m so grateful you made me so much stronger. Without you I wouldn’t have become such a great leader throughout the year. You really showed me how badly people could act and I learned how to deal with difficult people because of you. Thank you so much.” It is not about egotism masquerading as gratitude. I’m talking about a kind of thanks that recognizes with humility and goes maybe like this: “I sometimes use behaviors that cause problems between people and since you showed them to me, I’m better able to see them and work to eliminate them. Thanks for not letting me get away with that stuff.”

Hmmm. It’s easy to be grateful for our good jobs, our good friends, our good bank balances, our good shoes, good cars and houses, our good and well-behaved kids. Do we have the humility and fortitude to be grateful for the people who bruised us? Can I be humbly grateful for someone’s intolerance of my unacceptable behavior? Am I strong enough to be grateful for the whole work and life experience?

I wonder: Do I have the ego strength to be grateful for the icky stuff, too?

I hope so. Because if I - or we - don’t, we’re just not that strong. And I want to be stronger and more mature and a better leader of myself in communion with others each and every year.

The phrase is God Bless Us Everyone. It’s not, God Bless Only Those of Us Who Agree with Me and Whom I Like. E V E R Y O N E. If you’re a believer in God…isn’t it likely that she blesses everyone? If God blesses everyone forward, shouldn’t we, too?

Are we…are you and am I…strong enough, mature enough, BIG enough, leader enough to be thankful in that way?

Uncategorized