My grandfather just celebrated his 96th birthday. In his typical manner, it wasn’t from a La-Z-Boy chair in a retirement home. Rather, he was riding a camel at the pyramids in Egypt.
In contrast, I have an acquaintance that is a young mom, living in a big, beautiful house in a very affluent coastal town in California. But, she never leaves her bed. She has everything the world can offer, and she doesn’t enjoy any of it.
Of course, the circumstances of each of their lives have been very different. But the point isn’t the circumstances of our lives as much as our response to them.
We all have trials and heartbreaks. They are the inevitables of life, unwanted yet ever present, unsolicited yet always arriving into the moments of our lives.
My grandpa has had his own share of hardship. He lost one of his ten children in an awful and avoidable accident at the young age of twenty-one. My grandmother suffered through lung cancer, and he cared for her until she passed away in their home at seventy-one. He has an estranged son and has now outlived most of his friends. But every time I see him, he is grateful. He lives each day from a heart of gratitude. I’ve never seen anyone else quite like him.
One of my kids recently asked their great grandfather how he is so active and full of life at his age. His answer…attitude.
With Thanksgiving
To me, this is what a life living out Philippians 4:6-7 looks like. Fear has been overcome. Anxiety has been conquered, and thanksgiving is the rudder of life. Paul tells us with assertive language “do not be anxious.” But then he says to not be anxious “about anything.” I can get behind the first part. Of course we shouldn’t be anxious. It’s bad for our minds and bodies. It robs us of the experiences and pleasures of life. But I don’t understand the “about anything” part. Shouldn’t we be anxious about a cancer diagnosis, a wayward child, or a lost job? Isn’t it almost even wise to be concerned when things aren’t going well? Apparently not. Paul makes that clear when he says “instead.”
We have an alternative to anxiety. Though our knee jerk reaction may be anxiety, we can choose to respond differently. This is not to choose differently sometimes but in “every situation.” Yet, how do we do this? Paul tells us, “through prayer and petition with thanksgiving.”
I have read this verse many times throughout my life. I’ve committed it to memory and have come back to it when faced with the worries of this world. This time, though, it struck me differently. I always read it like, “Through prayer and petition. With thanksgiving, tell your requests to God.” But it’s actually, “through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, tell your requests to God.” The difference is subtle in grammatical structure but rich in spiritual meaning.
One separates the prayer and petition from the thanksgiving. The other incorporates the two, showing that the prayers and petition should come from a heart of gratitude. You see, our prayers and petitions can either come from a heart that is trying to direct the will of God to work in its favor or from a heart that is surrendered to the will of God. They can either come from a place of questioning whether God is actually good or from the deep knowledge that He loves us with an unfathomable love and wants better for us. What gets lost in the grammatical difference isn’t the goodness of God but our gratitude for it.
Trusting God Through the Mess
We all are prone to wander from the presence of God, prone to trust in other things, and prone to believe we know better than God. Our gracious God often lets us do so. What if rather than trying to tell God what we want, we INSTEAD trust that He knows better and has better for us? Perhaps some of the circumstances we are in have actually been placed in our lives by our loving Father because He wants us to gain this heart of gratitude.
I find it very important to note that verse 7 doesn’t say that God will change our circumstances. It says that He will change our hearts and minds.
Sometimes God doesn’t take us out of the mess we find ourselves in because He wants us to experience His peace guarding our hearts and minds, in the midst of the mess. This has been true for me personally. I can honestly say that it was in the most difficult circumstances of my life that I have felt the peace of God most intensely.
You see, the Lord is more concerned with our hearts and our minds than our situations. He is that personal, that compassionate, and that close. If He changed the circumstances of our lives at our every request but didn’t care and protect our hearts and minds, we would be spiritual spoiled brats at best.
Jesus Himself experienced this wrestling when He asked the Father to change His circumstances. As He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood because of the anguish He was about to experience, He asked “if possible, let this cup pass from me! Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Matthew 26:39). The Father did not change His circumstances, but He did change all of ours.
Jesus suffered the death that we deserved so that we could be set free from sin and death. He died in our place so that we could live with Him for all eternity. Jesus’s words shortly before going to the cross sums all of this up quite perfectly. He said, “I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble and suffering, but take courage–I have conquered the world” (John 16:33).
