Stymied.
After a blessed but harried week driving, meeting, representing, and addressing, I am without the focus or energy even to choose something to watch on whichever streaming service is already active on our TV. I am thankful instead to acquiesce in my wife’s selection of “The Great British Baking Show.” Its appeal to anglophiles, foodies, crafters, and anyone carb-deprived or otherwise hungry works for me on at least three levels. On the one level unappealing to me, crafts, I watch empathetically as one baker is flummoxed by how to construct a complex baked good he has never seen before. The written instructions are clear: join one element to the cut side of another. But because he sees the latter parade element from the wrong angle, the perfectly simple instruction is practically impossible to understand. Which side is cut?
A perfectly clear instruction: “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Restated, for those of us who may try to limit it: “…giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Ephesians 5:20). The command is clear, but it seems practically impossible to understand. How on earth would we join thanks to cuts like loss, sorrow, or suffering?
The baker had been looking at his cut element face-on. When he adjusts to see it edge-on, the instructions suddenly make sense, and he proceeds apace. His success is a reminder of my failures: the countless crafts I have left un- or embarrassingly done because my narrow, singular perspective obscured an otherwise plain instruction.
Regardless of our desire to obey it, the command to give thanks at times seems very complicated—a recipe for us to fail. A different angle may help: perhaps lifting the confusing element to see it in better contrast with heaven’s eternity; perhaps from our knees.
To a week realizing that a difficult instruction may be an invitation to change our perspective.
Thankful.