Grateful No Matter What

I have been angry for a while. Yesterday I worked at Hesed House.

Hesed House is one of our local homeless shelters. It you don’t appreciate what you have, working there for one night makes you appreciate it real quick. You see – at Hesed House, you don’t get to keep your room each day, you have to come back each day and get your room.

I worked the door – I checked people in and gave them rooms. They get to choose their room and many of the men that come to Hesed House would rather wait to go to sleep and put tables up, in order to sleep in quarters where they are watched.

The alternative is sleeping in the upstairs dormitory where there is not a night watchman. They don’t want to risk their lives and sleep up there, they would rather wait, be tired, and clean up the dining room before they sleep there.

For so many years, I have been a part of the rat race. Fearing the very thing that I faced last night. Fearing the end of safety. The problem is that all the work I was doing to keep myself and my family safe, was doing the opposite of safety. It was creating anxiety. It was creating fear.

God doesn’t want us to live in fear. He wants us to live in his power. Anything that we feel that is different than peace is not God. Yet – all these years – I have been giving it power. I continue to give it power.

“God didn’t give us a spirit that makes us weak and fearful. He gave us a spirit that gives us power and love. It helps us control ourselves” – 2 Timothy 1

I spoke to a man last night who cried while he said God Bless you and cried crocodile tears while he stated over and over his gratitude for our willingness to volunteer there. He probably didn’t remember, but the last time I worked at Hesed House, he did the very same thing. He told us that we wouldn’t see him there any more because he had gotten an apartment. God was good and had given him an apartment. He kept pointing his finger in the air at the person he was giving the credit for his apartment.

Have I given God credit for the things that I have accomplished in this life? Some – maybe. But not like that. I didn’t cry crocodile tears and give God all the credit like he did. I am humbled by this man’s gratitude for what God did for him.

This is the thing. None of us are safe from evil. However, we do have the ability to be grateful in the moment for what we have regardless of how much we have lost. We can thank God for everything he has given us and ask him to help us trust him. He loves us and wants us to trust in him.

So this morning, I woke up humbled. Am I still angry? Yes. But I think that my anger has subsided a little bit and that man, who got an apartment and cried crocodile tears thanking me for something that I really didn’t have to sacrifice that much to do gifted me with that. So today I stand in gratitude for a man who doesn’t know what he did for me.

And I point my finger at God thanking him for putting him in my path.