Archive for the ‘By Jeannine Buntrock’ Category
In the moment
Just this week, my young son was scheduled for a dental appointment. My husband and I knew he had a cavity, and I dreaded him facing the ordeal of the dental drill. Nate called to say that x-rays had revealed that the root of Jack’s baby tooth had dissolved, meaning that the tooth would be out soon and so drilling was not necessary.
Oh, the hallelujahs that followed as we hung up. I thanked God for the wonderful news and twirled around the living room with my sleeping infant daughter in my arms. I was on an enormous high: Yes, there is a God! He is listening!
I’m reading a book at the moment called Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro. The daughter of an orthodox Jew and a secret atheist, Shapiro struggles with matters of faith and it’s a fascinating read. Shapiro writes:
I have friends who call themselves atheists or agnostics. Friends who are believers. But the majority of people I know fall into a gray area, a category I would call the disenchanted. I can’t believe God would – fill in the blank. The bottom line: How could God condone – or possibly create – so much suffering in the world? If God exists, he’s either indifferent to our pain, or sadistically inflicting it. I refuse to believe in a God like that, they say.
At one point, she addresses the issues of good news vs. bad news and how we respond to it.
Something bad happens, there is no God. Something good happens, we thank him.
And here I was, twirling around my living room because there was a God.
I wouldn’t have consciously thought that there was no God had the news been different, but the fact of the matter was, I was braced for bad news. I expected it. I absolutely believe that God is fully aware of my concerns, worries and needs – but like anyone else, I have had bad news before.
What does it mean, when our prayers, whatever form they take, appear at times to be answered, and at other times ignored? Does God listen selectively? Does he pick and choose when to visibly come through for us? If good fortune is a sign of God watching out for us, what is bad fortune a sign of?
These are age-old questions and I certainly don’t have the answers to them. But what I am finding is that God is most visible to me when I slow down and live in the moment. When I stop anxiously scanning the horizon for darkening clouds. When I stop living in the past or the future and live instead, soaking in the beauty of this moment. It’s then that I notice all the things that really are, to me, evidence of a God of pure love all around me: trees and flowers, snowflakes, each one unique, the bright blue irises in my child’s eyes, the warmth of the sun on a cold winter day, a healed scrape or cough. I could go on and on. Shapiro concludes her thoughts on this topic with:
I prayed for the willingness to pray – not to an indifferent God, certainly not to a punishing and vengeful God, not to a God who was watching out for me – but to the God I felt all around me, the more I looked.
I have no doubt that the Triune God danced around my living room with me at the good news for my son. I believe that the source of the good news was God, the source of all good things. Had the news been bad, I believe that that same God would have surrounded me with love and comfort – with his very self – in my living room. But if I wasn’t living in that moment and in the future at Jack’s appointment instead, I’d have missed it.
So I’m resolving to slow down and to live in the moment – for many reasons – but most of all because I don’t want to miss the millions of ways that God communicates his care and love to me. Every moment.
– Jeannine Buntrock
Not mine, but his.
Filed under: By Jeannine Buntrock, Love | Tags: God Likes You, Jesus
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Our newest baby girl was born just over two weeks ago. This is my third baby, and once again, I am hopelessly in love with my latest — my last — tiny bundle. I’ve found myself looking at her in amazement, thinking to myself that all these months, it’s been she I carried. She who was invisible to me for so long is here — already with a face I will never forget, hints of the remarkable person she will be, and a place in my heart forever hers alone. When I tell my two older children that my heart has grown to make room for their baby sister, which means no less love for them, I mean it. It has.
I’ve wondered many, many times how it was that I lived my life before they were born never thinking of them — never knowing that they lay ahead — and that once they were born, there would never be a moment that passed that I wasn’t, on some level, thinking about them, worrying about them, hoping and praying for only the best for them. Never a moment that I wasn’t their mother. The kind of love I feel in those transcendent, focused moments when I look at any of my three children is enough to make me explode.
In The Secret, C. Baxter Kruger writes about his interaction with a mother who feels that she isn’t doing enough for God when she compares herself to missionaries. He points out that she works very hard to care for her daughter. Where did your concern for your daughter come from? I mean, did you just decide that you were going to be a good mother and flip a switch that created this burden for your daughter’s welfare? What is the origin of your love for her or for your family…?
Kruger goes on to tell the mother: It is not your burden and delight, but his.
My burden and my delight in my children is not mine, but his! He put his passion for my children in me — I get to participate! — but it all originates with and is sustained by him. If there is no distance I wouldn’t go for my children, whatever the cost, it’s because there is no distance he wouldn’t go, and hasn’t gone, whatever the cost. If I see the incredible beauty, value and potential in my children and desperately want them to see it in themselves too, it’s because he does. If I am proud to the point of bursting at every teeny, tiny step they take as they grow, it’s because he is. If I feel their pain as if it was happening to me and cry when they cry, it’s because he does.
As a mother, just acknowledging this is the beginning of the end of fear for me — I am not in this alone!! My inadequacies are not his. I may have lived my life previously not aware of and not yet loving the little ones who lay ahead of me — but he didn’t. They have always been on his mind and loved beyond description. They are safe with him.
And so it is with all of us — all people. We have never been invisible to him. We have never been out of his mind. He has always loved us beyond description. We are safe with him.
So be assured that as I gaze at my delicious newborn and know in my bones that nothing she ever does will make me love her less, he looks at you and loves you that way (and oh, so exponentially more).
~ Jeannine Buntrock
Note: To any of you mothers or fathers who have ever been told that your work nurturing your children isn’t “enough,” or doesn’t really count as being “for God,” don’t buy it. Your work is holy!
Gratitude will change your brain
Filed under: By Jeannine Buntrock, Christian Living | Tags: Christian Living, Hope
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We’ve all heard it said that gratitude should be part of every day – not just Thanksgiving Day. It’s clearly true – but why?
I used to believe that gratitude was a way to appease God – that if I didn’t express gratitude to Him, He might tear away the blessings that I had come unwittingly to take for granted, or withhold others in the future. After all, aren’t we rightfully disheartened to see our own children take for granted what we or others give them? – to see that the more they receive, the more they seem to want? I know my reaction can be to attempt to teach them gratitude by giving them less materially in the future.
But one of the things I am most grateful for today is that I don’t see our Triune God that way anymore. He is not sitting on a distant throne, waiting imperiously for me to kiss the ring on His finger and back away making a show of my appreciation. He is not waiting to replace a blessing with a curse if I forget to marvel each and every day at every heartbeat. every breath, every blade of grass, every ray of sunlight in my life that simply would cease to be if not for His constant care and love.
Yes, the importance of gratitude cannot be overstated – it connects us in our own minds to God, our Source (when in reality, we are never disconnected) and the Source of every good thing, and reminds us that we are loved beyond description.
But there is another reason – it turns out that gratitude is good for us.
“Research suggests that grateful people have more energy and optimism, are less bothered by life’s hassles, are more resilient in the face of stress, have better health, and suffer less depression than the rest of us,” writes Joan Boryenko, Ph.D. “People who practice gratitude – and yes, it is something one can learn and improve – are also more compassionate, more likely to help others, less materialistic, and more satisfied with life.”
In the book Code To Joy: The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness, authors Pratt and Lambrou point out that we naturally look for “what is wrong, what is dangerous, what is harmful, and what is not working in our lives.” Yet by building a daily gratitude habit – as simple as keeping a journal where you record every day just one thing that you are grateful for and review what you have written on the days preceding – the authors make the case that you will profoundly change your brain. “Rather than looking for what’s wrong, you are reprogramming your neural search engine to look for what’s right.”
And in looking for evidence of God working tirelessly and personally in the trenches of our own seemingly dark, sad world, where better to find Him than where things are going right? Of course, He is also to be found where things appear, to our eyes, to be going desperately and hopelessly wrong. In truth though, He has beaten and redeemed every injustice, every crime, every hurt. But since our shoulders are not as broad as His and our perspective limited in ways His is not, we can become weighed down and discouraged by such things if we do not train ourselves still to look for the good. But when you do, before you know it, what once appeared to be a dark, sad, hopeless, even Godless world can become transformed – to be seen as the bright, hopeful, miraculous, limitless, God-filled place that it really is.
What better thing to pass on to and share with those around us than eyes trained by gratitude to see even glimpses of the shining reality of God’s beloved world?
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
– Jeannine Buntrock