Hi Ren Family!
Last Sunday was pretty sweet with about 50 gathered. It feels a little like the early days of planting a church. But then I remember that most of you are watching from home. The livestream worked well and it was exciting to all be together for Sunday worship through technology! I’m so grateful for the production team led by Shayna, Carlos and Alli, who have made this possible. We have such an amazing church community!
Speaking of gratitude, it seems to be a theme for me personally in recent days. About a month ago, just before we reopened, one of my friends very gently called me out about complaining. He pointed out that on several occasions I complained about wearing a mask. The kind hearted poke became a seed that the Lord has been watering to help me to grow in this area.
The opposite of gratitude is, of course, ingratitude. There are many other associated words like pessimism, criticalness, negativity, worry, fear, fretting, whining, griping, and so on. The mental habit of always focusing on the negative leads to cynicism as we anticipate bad things happening. Naturally, this leads to discontentment. It’s impossible to be ungrateful and joyful at the same time. They just don’t mesh. Gratitude and joy are deeply woven together.
Another friend recently was confessing she was getting a little mopey like Eeyore, one of the characters from Winnie the Pooh. Now, if you don’t know the characters of Winnie the Pooh, they are so representative of mental attitudes. Eeyore is a donkey, and he is perpetually stuck in pulling everything into a negative spin. It even affects the way he walks and talks, a sing-songy moaning and dragging of the feet. Tigger is the complete opposite and gets excited about everything and bounces around with exuberance. Maybe sometimes overly positive? Piglet is anxious, always saying, “Oh d-d-d-dear”. Pooh is definitely a “feeler” and you could see how all these different dispositions around him affected him.
Some say that people fall into one of two categories. They either “see the glass as half full” or they “see the glass as half empty”. The first might pride themselves in being optimists and the latter group, realists. There is probably some truth that we are wired with a bend one way or the other. You can see it in the varying dispositions of children growing up in the same house. But family culture can certainly influence us a lot as some families are teeming with positive energy and other families, well, are not. Society plays a role too. New England, in particular, is known for its cynicism and criticalness. All these things are factors.
Though there are genetic and cultural and familial factors that squeeze us to be one way or another, we have to take responsibility for our minds. Scripture says, “as a man thinks, so he is”. In other words, we can’t blame our pessimistic attitude on anyone other than ourselves. Nobody controls our minds. People around us and even Satan himself might throw a thought at us but we choose what we entertain in the mind.
Again, this has been a theme for me recently as I’ve realized that my natural bend—at least internally—can be toward the negative. I say “internally” because, as a pastor, I put up a great front of positivity. I know how to act like Tigger when actually I’m feeling like Eeyore inside.
Church culture, especially if we are deep in it, can play a huge role in the attitude of our minds. Not all church cultures are the same depending on the geographic location, the particular mix of people and the disposition of the leader. One characteristic of Ren Church culture that is something I’ve heard many people point out is that we are “real”. And I love this. It means we aren’t fake or plastic. We don’t feel pressure to be pumped up all the time. We don’t pretend like everything is great when it’s not. We are honest. This is a really good quality but it has a snare. Let me explain.
At any given point in time there are positives and negatives. In this very moment as I write (or as you read this) there are countless wonderful beautiful glorious things happening and there are countless terrible frightening tragic things happening. With social media and the internet, we now have instant access to more good and more bad than we can possibly process each day. Our mental outlook can soar and dive like a roller coaster, based on what piece of information we are feeding on.
I’m not saying we should avoid thinking about sad things. In fact, I think it’s important to have a worldview that encompasses the full orb of human experience. But it’s important to cultivate the practice of steering our minds toward the positive; to just keep throwing ourselves toward optimism; to keep imagining the best outcomes—rather than musing on the worst things that might happen!
This practice is more than something we do during our morning devotion. It’s 1000 choices a day. It’s what we do with our minds from morning till night. The act of speaking gratitude to others, and especially to God, begins to shape our attitude until it becomes a “default setting”.
I’ll be the first to confess—and those closest to me would agree—I am not great at this. I was born with a very strong natural inclination toward melancholy. That’s just a more artful way of saying, “I get cranky”. A pandemic doesn’t help. Since the Lord seems to be dealing with me a bit about this I have hope because He always provides ample grace to help. I’m praying that I would be overflowing with gratitude, joy and optimism! I pray that all of us would pursue this and that the Ren community wouldn’t be just famous for being real, but it would be famous for its contagious joy. C’mon!
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Philippians 4:4-8