In the beginning. . .

Once upon a time, a couple of years ago, I had to do a project to complete my master’s degree in ministry.  The project was mine to come up with, develop and implement, and at first I had a lot of ideas that I played around with, but I kept coming back to wanting to do something with Stewardship and Sacraments.  When I began considering ideas, I really wanted to do something around Epiphany, because both stewardship and sacrament have much to do with receiving gifts, and well, so does Epiphany, so I figured I could really highlight that theme and do some great things with it.  In anticipation of that, I created this blog to flush out some ideas, and perhaps get some feedback in the comments section. 

The title came from the notion that we’ve all received gifts we weren’t sure what to do with, and so we put them aside in hopes of finding an opportunity to give them away to someone else.  As it happens, grace is a gift that we sometimes don’t know what to do with—so we put it aside.  But unlike other gifts, it’s a bit harder to pass on, unless we find a value for it ourselves.  And unlike other gifts that generally come at appointed times—birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, etc.—grace is given non-stop in a steady stream from the moment of our baptism (although I suspect God doesn’t wait until we decide to put an official start date on the grace-giving!). So the idea was to try to make grace more easily recognizable and understandable so we can more readily pass it on.  But I’m a horrible procrastinator (maybe I need to find some lyrics to indicate that in my profile—later) and before I knew it, Epiphany was going to be here too soon to do a decent project, so I had to take my idea in a slightly different.  Thus, the blog was created, and then abandoned.  But I’ve always thought about getting back to it—just to see if I can do it. 

 

(For the record, I did complete the project, and receive my master’s degree.)

While I was working on my project, it was fairly easy to be positive and hopeful about everything in my life—because I was always focusing on the good (because, frankly, I needed examples and object lessons for my project!).  But fast forward a couple of years, and with that focus no longer in front of me, I find that I am far too easily discouraged, dismayed and demoralized. Life throws a lot of stuff at us sometimes, and it’s easy to feel like we’re all in this alone rather than together.  We live in a culture which applauds individuality, promotes getting ahead at the expense of others, celebrates that which is cheap and easy, and flowers the path with negativity and mean spiritedness.  It's all too tempting to give in to despair, and more and more difficult to keep focused on the many good things that happen each day, and how the grace which is showered upon us should move us to look outside ourselves. 

So, (I hope) without being a Pollyanna or getting overly sanctimonious, I’ve decided to use this space to applaud the instances I see of people working for the common good, considering others, celebrating doing hard things because they’re the right things to do, and strewing seeds and flowers of positivity and good humor.  Because those are forms of re-gifting grace, and I mean to re-gift them in turn.