Thanks in the darkness....

As someone whose wandered through the bible a few times, mainly to write exegetical papers and impress professors. I originally wanted to do a post about praising in prison, connect the dots to the horrible situation in India, quote a few scriptures and leave you, the reader, encouraged.

Alas, that blog has been written to death, by many much more eloquent writers than I.

Instead i found myself meditating on my journey, through this life and my faith and realized that when times are dark, I'm not Paul, singing in the darkness with chains around my limbs. Nope i'm more like the desperate woman that's seeking Jesus to be healed of her bleeding. I then realized that as americans we are terrible at grieving. We eschew public displays of grief, we want people to get over it. We dont give them time to heal. This is reflected in the way we treat the Passion narratives. We get to Gethsemane and we skip over Jesus' crying, sweating blood in agony, praying with intensity and being frustrated with his disciples. We gloss over all that until he says "not my will, but thine" or head over to John, where there is no Gethsemane.

Americans are "Hope" addicts. We want the sweet, the reassurance that all will be alright, if we just keep living.

A cranky, but wise, old man told me he believed that hope was a substitute for action. As long as we have hope we dont have to do anything. When i read the prison epistles with this bit of wisdom in mind, i realized that Paul and his companions didn't have hope. They fully expected to die. But instead of sitting there, hoping for a change in their circumstances, they sang, they praised, they prayed, they wrote letters home. They acted.

So in these dark times, lets take action by first giving thanks for what the Lord has done, what the Lord will do and what the Lord calls us to do. Then lets get on with the business of doing it, even if the only thing we can do, is give thanks, pray, praise and sing in our prisons.