Theology for Breakfast: Keepsakes & Armor

Richelle Thompson. Daily reflections on scripture in Forward Day by Day, May 2020. Cincinnati: Forward Movement.

"For my days drift away like smoke," sighs the psalmist (102.3) some 2700 years before shelter-in-place orders. When Richelle Thompson was composing her meditations for Forward Day by Day, COVID-19 was not yet a thing. But her bite-sized essays have been a consistent pleasure to mark the passing of this month.

When her days are like smoke, and she lies awake in bed like that sparrow lonely on a housetop (102.7), she gives thanks that Psalms so often express exactly what she feels. She challenges us, when the days drift by, to pray to be as fully present in each moment as God is to us.

For Richelle Thompson, gratitude is equipment like the "helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit" (Eph. 6.17) to prepare us like superheroes "to face, if not evil, then the challenges of the day." She suggests other protections:

• Encouraging passages of scripture that, like God, stay with you wherever you go (Joshua 1.9); Thompson compares these to cherished tokens on her desk from other times in her life that remind her of what she's come through and what she wants to do;
• Lists of details like all those instructions for the ark in Exodus 25, which remind Thompson of instructions from IKEA. She wonders if Exodus is telling us that small details matter? She challenges us to keep a list this week of small acts of faithful generosity;
• Lists of things for which you are grateful;
• The names of laypersons in your faith community you can lift up for doing amazing things in your midst.

Besides lists, storytelling can make an even greater difference in our lives. Thompson observes that Jesus speaks in parables (Matthew 13.10) so that his teachings come as "lived experiences" instead of "rote recitations." She shares a couple of memorable examples from her own family that will stick with me, I hope. When the psalmist prays, "let me not be disappointed" (119.116), Thompson tells us of a beach house intended to be a reunion spot for generations of her family, until divorce wrecked that dream. The good news is, new traditions grew up around the place, and the disappointment is redeemed. Thompson relates the parable of seeds to parenting as a great act of faith. She recounts how her two teenage children in separate incidents used their own money to buy shoes -- one pair for a barefoot child at an after-school care center, another for a classmate who'd worn the same sneakers for three years. The teens had been especially difficult that week, but these acts of generosity came as reassurance that the seeds planted early in their lives were bearing fruit.

A couple of her stories riff on Biblical lines about gates. "I am the gate," Jesus says (John 10.9), but Thompson tells of her daughter's gate-phobic horse. Her daughter's competitors set aside their rivalry to lure and nudge the horse through the gate into the arena. Do we need to be nudges, or nudged? The narrow gate (Matthew 7.14) reminds her of a retreat called "Narrowgate" on a cattle ranch where a trench overlaid with metal pipes is enough to keep cattle from crossing through a wide gate into the parking lot. The cattle, having poor depth perception, are frightened off by shadows in the trough. We, too, may draw back from wide gates in our lives from unfounded fear.

Sometimes Thompson finds a positive spin on scriptures that have bothered her. She wonders of Paul's admonition wives obey your husbands (Col. 3.18) might not have been "a blunt tool" to suppress women but Paul's "lever" to lift women up into the consciousness of his highly patriarchal listeners? Bothered by political strife, she tries to pray for enemies and trust God (Mt 5.44). She wonders why the passages that compare God to a refining fire always use silver for the image, instead of gold or copper (Ps 66.9). She reads that silver is more resistant to corrosion, and more reflective: Could it be that those refined by God thereby become more persevering and reflective of His love?

At the end of each reading is a one-line challenge with the motto, Going Forward, and Thompson's seem especially promising. She challenges us to think on a scripture that bothers us, to find a new way to hear it. She challenges us to take the commandment literally to love our neighbors -- and to invite actual neighbors in. Responding to Psalm 40.13-14, she urges us to let ourselves admit "God, I am overwhelmed." Relating the stone that the builders rejected to young gadflies Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai, she challenges us to think of an unlikely person who speaks an important truth that we may need to remember. She asks, "How could you surprise someone with a gift of grace today?" Wondering about the phrase "stiff-necked people" in Ex. 33.36, which appears more than 40 other times in scripture, always as a quality that God detests, Thompson challenges us to discern the difference between determination and stubborness.

A new month brings a new author in Forward. I'm looking forward.