The Mechanics of the Slide
The physics of sliding down a playground slide has to do with gravity, friction, inertia, and kinetic and potential energy. Your speed will be affected by your weight, the condition of the slide and the temperature. For a child, there is little that compares with the exhilaration of a good slide. In Lone Hill, South Africa there was a playground within walking distance of our home that contained a huge slide. The children were hesitant to climb the step ladder to that slide purely because of its height.
The picture above is “Slide Hill,” the longest slide in New York City, on Governors Island. Children exude anticipation as they climb up and slide down the famous slide in this new park. A couple of lessons: 1) It takes effort to climb to the top of a slide; and 2) you slide downward quickly.
A Sinister Slide
There is another infamous slide that is recorded in the Scriptures. This slide is ugly. It is harsh. It is fatal and destructive. It starts out at the top in Romans 1:18 and continues rapidly downward, through twists and turns, to verse 32. There is a baleful initial description of the ones sitting at the top of that slide. The people who start down this slide are not thankful. Ungrateful people suppress the truth of who God is and exchange it for a lie.
1:21 “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”
Thankfulness is an antidote to temptation. The inverse is also true. Ingratitude seems to invite every form of temptation and sin. I have often mused over how ingratitude seems to create the fertile conditions of sin prospering. My daughter Elly once said that “it is hard for a selfish person to be thankful.” The essence of sin is self – self-absorption, self-preoccupation, self-rule and self-worship. You see all of your blessings as coming from your dreams and your hard work. And yet you are not fully a god just yet, so you are chronically competitive, discontent, and unthankful.
There are two things that sin does not love to do; to honor and glorify God as the source of every good thing, and to thank God for every good thing and for every bad thing He is working together for our good. Sin wants to replace God with self and with alternate loves that supposedly will bring happiness to self and awkwardly try to fill our God-shaped void.
If you sense that you are not a very thankful person, perhaps it would be good to do some introspection. Why do I not want to be thankful? Do I want to count my many hardships? Is it just that I don’t think about being thankful? Or do I disregard it?
Cultivating thinking thanks keeps us from beginning down the long and winding slide that is smooth and breezy at the top but becomes indulgent, brutal, empty, and destructive toward the bottom.
“Genuine thankfulness is an act of the heart’s affections, not an act of the lips’ muscles.” –John Piper
Eternity Glasses
How are you doing at that? Does it come out of you non-stop throughout your day? Start with just being thankful that you could take that last breath. You ate today. You are wearing clothes. You can see with your eyes to read these words. You have access to the internet and this blog and whatever device you are using. You have just been able to read truths that will never lose their potency. One of those truths being that godliness with contentment is great gain.
Choosing to Forgive
Life (and the sovereign God behind it) will bring opportunities for us to choose to overcome evil with good, darkness with light. Romans 12:17-21 talks about what to do when we are served evil. Verse 21 says to not be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good.
The Lord IS our Rock, and He wants us to meditate and give thanks for that.
By the way, I love trees. I also love VW bugs; it was the first car I ever owned. As I cruise down the road of life, may I choose to be th(i)nkful about all the carbon that comes my way today. It makes the journey so much more enjoyable.
This is a picture of our son, Nicolas, and his beautiful Julia. They gave me a special present this year for my birthday – a Daily Gratitude Journal! In this journal there are only blank pages divided by a line in the middle and a space on which to put the date. You could use really any kind of notebook to do the same thing. The idea behind it is to get into a pattern of writing down your th(i)nkful list. At the end of the day you take a moment to reflect on what you were thankful for that day.
I started doing that after getting this book from Nick and Julia. Some entries are not so full. Some entries can barely fit all that I want to record. But the beautiful thing that I find happening to me is that, as I go through my days, I make mental notes of the things I need to remember to record that evening. This goes for easy days, as well has hard days.
learned a gem that afternoon. Our group sang songs for them and in return they wanted to sing for us. They did a much better job. 🙂 One of the songs they sang was “Hold on to Jesus, Hold on, Hold on, Hold on.” I thought to myself that wow, that doctrine was so shallow. They should have been taught deeper truths. However, the gem I discovered was that the most important thing to do when going through horrendous difficulties and challenges is to “Hold on to Jesus.”
I am so glad that God made us with emotions. When He created us in His image, that image included emotions. The Scriptures tell us that God laughs, grieves, has compassion, sings, and has righteous anger. We can often get confused by our emotions. They feel strong, like they are controlling us, but actually they are fueled by another source – the mind. Emotions are a window into what we’ve been thinking about.
th(i)nkful 