On Good Gifts, a Lesson from Richard Foster, and Enjoying with Limits
A Note from Me
I look around and see how many good things fill a day: sun on my face, a smooth stone in my palm, a Mary Oliver poem, a Wendell Berry essay, Erroll Garner at the piano, Nat King Cole’s voice, a steak cooked just right, a grilled peach, a frozen margarita.
Life is full of these kinds of gifts—ordinary and extraordinary all at once. But here’s the trouble I keep running into: I can take something good and turn it sour by overdoing it. I can eat too much and feel sick. I can lose myself in a book and ignore the needs around me. I can overwork in the yard while neglecting the people inside my house.
The problem isn’t that the gifts are bad—it’s that I don’t always know how to receive them well.
That seems to be one of the hardest lessons of the Christian life. The real challenge isn’t only resisting what is destructive, it’s learning how to partake of what is good without twisting it. I suspect this is part of God’s training for all of us—learning how to handle joy without harm, so that in the end we can be ready for the one great Good that all these smaller gifts point toward.
A Voice from the Christian Tradition
“We live in an age in which right discipline and control over one’s life are so little understood that obsession and abstinence are the only categories that make sense for the modern mind. Either we reject a thing out of hand or we accept it without reservation. This is why dogmatism is so popular today–whether in religion, politics, or economics.
It is precisely this that makes it so incumbent upon us to teach children use without abuse in all of life. We show them by example that it is quite possible to watch a single television program and then turn the set off, to eat what is required for good health and then stop, to enjoy good music and then experience silence.
Once children see from us that it is possible to exercise restraint over human passions, then it will be possible to convey the notion of money as servant rather than master.”
—Richard J. Foster, The Challenge of the Disciplined Life
A Question to Carry
What good thing are you tempted to overdo?
Still learning all of this,
—Jon
I’m addicted to knowing, to desiring to know, to understanding, to having knowledge. The primary revelation of my addiction is the increasing number of books placed on shelves around my home. I believe this is a very obvious sign of the sin of greed. I am desiring to live in the true freedom of satisfaction. Again, does this make sense?