A God Thing

I should know better than to gripe to God, because sooner or later, I’ll get the spiritual two-by-four upside the head. (Although I’m sure I’ll probably continue to gripe, because it’s rather satisfying to gripe to someone who doesn’t get tired of me whining or tell me to cheer up when I don’t feel like cheering up.) So Saturday I was griping because I’d gone out and bought the t-shirts for our church’s little music festival, and few of them were bought, and I had all these doggone shirts left. What am I going to do with all these shirts? I don’t know yet, but I’m sure I’ll find out. These things work themselves out one way or another, I've found. I need to remember that.

The thing I forgot was that the music festival was never about the shirts, and in fact it probably wasn’t even about getting an ecumenical group of musicians out to play great music and have fun on a sunny August day, though all of us thought that was the main purpose of it. Our slogan this year was “Jesus is alive in Federal Way,” which we thought was about singing and playing hymns from the heart and soul with a rock beat.

Not quite. It was actually all about getting people where they needed to be, so that their needs could be met. Which of course is a God-thing, as we at our United Methodist Church would say. It often means the Spirit takes what you've got and does something unexpected with it, but something useful and good.

It’s been my observation that God-things happen all the time, and while most people call them “coincidences” or “serendipity” or even “magic,” they happen a lot at our church, more than I think should be possible. Someone will come into the church office worried because his refrigerator is broken, and then a minute later someone else comes in wanting to get rid of their old but still good refrigerator fast because they just bought a new one. Or the time we needed a sound board operator for our church band for a few weeks. A complete stranger came up to our music director at a non-church party the next evening, and asked if he knew anyone who needed a sound board operator—for EXACTLY the length of time we needed one. Or we needed some plywood to build something, and it just so happens someone comes by the church and wonders if they could offload some plywood. And so on. Happens so often we just shrug our shoulders and say, “it’s a God thing.”

We foolishly thought our church-back-yard music festival was about the music. What it really was about was the person from our neighborhood who heard the music, wandered in, saw our pastor (who no doubt looked approachable because of the balloon animal he was wearing on his head), and ended up finding emotional relief and comfort after talking with him. And it was about one of our own who was anxious about going from a company job to owning her own business after having to deal with the trauma of a family member's severe illness, but found peace when she connected with a stranger (an angel unawares?) who told her she had blessings and abundance surrounding her in what she was going to pursue. And more, probably in ways I haven't heard yet.

I really do have to have faith that even though I may not understand and know the effects of my actions, that they do have an effect. Heaven knows I've been shown this over and over again, even when I've been in despair. There was a time when I despaired of writing romance novels--people call them trash, after all, and what good is trash? It hurt badly sometimes when I would sit down and write something I loved, and then look at it later only to think, there are people out there who think what I do is trash, no matter how much I love it, no matter how much I put all my intellect and heart and soul into it.

I went to a group autographing once a few years ago, feeling that despair. There, a woman asked me to sign a copy of my book for her sister, who had cancer. She said that reading books like mine kept her sister from feeling the pain and the sickness of the disease and the treatments, and gave her hope. I realized then that my vocation of writing romance novels was not about me, or what others think, but was all about that woman, and people like her. People who need hope, who need respite from their very real, very hard, daily lives. It is the privileged who can afford to make judgments on whether a work of creativity is worthy of artistic note. Those who must deal with dread reality only know what keeps them sane and alive. If my books help them do that, then I am more than satisfied. I wish I could thank that woman who came to the autographing. She helped give me a new perspective that is now a deep river of calm underneath the ups and downs of my life.

I have to think that people finding comfort and joy, and the affirmation to follow their bliss and their creativity, are worth more than a bunch of leftover t-shirts. It's closer to what “Jesus is Alive in Federal Way” is about than our very mundane thoughts on musical expression.

So I’m not going to gripe about those t-shirts. At best it means they and I were part of an event that got people connected to what they deeply needed, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At worst, it’ll mean we'll give away the shirts, and there will be a lot of homeless folk who will be wearing some nice, clean t-shirts. I really can’t lose, when I think of it that way. ☺

--Karen H