Grateful Instead

Today is one of those fall days that probably needn’t ever come.  It’s windier than the dickens outside…35 to 50 mph winds out of the west and northwest.  It’s cool, but not freezing.  And since there hasn’t been a killing freeze here yet, all manner of pollen and dander has been stirred up in the wind.  It’s hard to drive down a street; hard to stand outside; hard to walk; and hard to keep from having a headache from the sinus issues.

But I shouldn’t be so gripe-laden.  I’m not indoors; cant hear the wind; am warm; and my headache is moderated by generic Tylenol.  I don’t have to sleep outside tonight, and I’ll have plenty to eat and clean clothes for the morning.

It’s really tough, sometimes, to avoid the complaint party that many others seem to be attending.  We readily chime in with whatever ails us, and whatever might ail us in the future.  And some of us regale the others with stories of long ago and far away when we had to walk 7 miles uphill both ways to a one-room school in all kinds of weather with nothing more for shoes than a couple of pieces of cardboard, etc. etc.

Make no mistake.  There are people today, right outside your door, who are using cardboard for shelter and/or clothing.  There are people today, right outside your door, who will wear the same clothes tomorrow as they did today, and as they have for the past who-knows how many days.  There are people today, right outside your door, who won’t have anything to eat tonight…didn’t have anything to eat today…won’t have anything to eat tomorrow.

This privileged life is one thing I don’t really understand.  Why am I here?  Why am I not “over there?”  What is expected of me because I’m here and not there?  Am I fulfilling that expectation?  If not, what do I need to do?

It is said that Joseph Stalin prohibited the showing of “The Grapes of Wrath” from being shown in the Soviet Union.  If you know the film, you know the intent of the film makers was to deptct the downside of American life in the 1930’s.

Why, you may ask, would Stalin want to keep the citizens of the Soviet Union from seeing the downside to American life?  The movie also showed that even the poor had vehicles and could go wherever they wanted to go…which was not the case in the Soviet Union.  Stalin considered that truth to be too “political.”  (Credit Lloyd Billingsley, The Seuctive Image: A Christian Critique of the World of Film)

What is one person’s poverty is riches for another.  What is difficult and tough for one is just what another wishes for.  We choose not where we were born or to what culture we were born into.  But we do choose what we will do with what we have been given.  We do choose how we will be caretakers of those things that have been endowed to us.

The next time you feel like griping or complaining, think of those folks in "The Grapes of Wrath" and how their poverty appeared to be wealth to another culture…so much so that the government stepped in and refused to allow them to view the film.  Then decide whether you are still justified in your complaint.  You might just find that you need to be grateful instead.