By Mike Ivaska
As I sit and write, my family and I prepare to go to the hospital.
It will just be a preparatory appointment (which, by the time you read this, will have been a few weeks ago). But the timing is imperfect.
Our daughter needs a corrective procedure to fix something in her back. This will take place 10 days from today when I sit and write. The timing means she will miss Halloween. We are throwing a party for her and a few of her friends, so she won’t miss the holiday completely. But during one of her favorite days of the year our kiddo will be laying on the couch taking pain meds.
I once read a book by Baptist preacher John Piper titled “Future Grace.” The book focuses on Christian obedience to God and the inner motivations involved. Piper is a challenging teacher, and I tend to take a softer approach to a lot of things than he does. But the premise of the book, that we take each step in faith that God will be there when our foot hits the ground, is important.
As we enter the month of Thanksgiving – and as I write this piece weeks before Halloween, writing about events in my family that are future to me but will be past-tense by the time you read this – I think about that title, Future Grace.
In many Christian churches, the central act of worship is a meal of bread and wine (or, in our church’s case, grape juice). This meal goes by many names, but one of the most traditional is eucharist. The bread, if you don’t know, corresponds to Jesus’ broken body on the cross. The cup, his shed blood. Though the traditions explain it in many different ways, all churches believe Christ meets us in a special way in this meal. We are fed by our Savior in this meal. His death becomes our life.
The meal is also, the apostle Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians, a proclamation of Jesus’ death “til he comes again.”
The word eucharist comes from the Greek, eucharistia, which means – believe it or not –thanksgiving. The meal is an act of gratitude for what Jesus has done, and an act of hope in God’s final salvation.
The eucharist is a thanksgiving meal.
It is also faith in future grace.
The same holds true, I suppose, of that Thanksgiving meal many of us will be eating toward the end of November. As we plan and purchase and extend invitations, we will do so in faith and hope that the day will actually come. Thanksgiving will get here and we will finally sit down with those we love.
We will sit down and remember those who are no longer with us.
We will also likely talk about future Thanksgivings.
By the time this Thanksgiving rolls around, my daughter ought to be well into the journey of recovery. That is my prayer and my hope. I look forward to finally getting to look back – to finally having all this surgery stuff behind us.
Those were wise words from Jesus when he told us not to worry for tomorrow. We all spend way too much time with our heads in the future (or the past!). But Jesus said those words about worry in his Sermon on the Mount, where he also promises that God will take care of us. God clothes the fields with lilies and feeds the birds of the air, Jesus told us. Will he not also feed and clothe us, O we of little faith?
Jesus tells us not to worry, which means he knows that we do. He knows we need to see all the good in our lives as coming from God, but he also knows we need confidence that God will be with us tomorrow as well.
Because as important as it is to be grateful – and God knows how important that is! – we not only need a little more gratitude in our lives. We also need faith in future grace.
