First Grace

It’s after I cut the squash right open.

The two halves split and quartered there on the cutting board.

After the paintbrushes are washed out, after the pawns of the chess game are all returned to their squares, after the potatoes are baked and served, the dinner plates are pushed back empty. The Farmer splits the Word right open then and that’s when I’m cut to the quick.

“First, I thank my God …” That’s what it reads, right there in Romans 1. The Farmer reads it slow — what should always come first in everything. And Paul writes more, peels back the hot holiness of God. I hold it there in my hands. The holy words that hollow me out.

The light fills the drinking cups still on the table. I can feel its warmth on the nape of my neck. Spring coming. The heat of it melting everything cold.

One of the best writers I’ve read and a kind friend, pastor, and fellow Canadian, Mark Buchanan, asked the most critical questions of them all: “What initially sparks God’s anger? What is the root sin, the molten core of wickedness and godlessness — that convinces God to turn us over?”^a

Isn’t that what we have to figure out? It’s right there in Romans 1. It’s not the sinfulness you’d think it’d be: It’s the thanklessness — that we do. It’s our thanklessness that first stirs the full wrath of God.

The beginnings of Genesis and Romans 1 pivot on the same point: Eve’s thanklessness for all God does give and her resentfulness of the one fruit He doesn’t give, this is the catalyst of the fall. Which Romans 1 confirms: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.

The pride of thanklessness always comes before the fall. God makes Himself plain and there’s no excuse — but they did not give Him thanks.

I have done this and just this morning, there spooning potatoes. The house upended with ridiculously messy and wondrous living. Paint smeared on a shirt, across a table. The chess loser in loud tears. The stringy innards of squash all over the counter. Instead of falling on my knees in thanks, I fall into sin and anger.

When I refuse to give God thanks? God lets our very lives become refuse.

I’d do well to stitch it into the fabric of me: A lack of doxology leads to depravity.

That is what Buchanan discovers in Scripture, right there in Romans: “The heart of wickedness and godlessness is that: a refusal to glorify God. It’s the refusal to thank Him.”^b

Wickedness isn’t rooted primarily in some ghetto, on some shady backstreet. No, as Buchanan states, “All the wickedness in the world begins with an act of forgetting.”^c

I nod slow.

In a thousand infinite ways God turns His glory around for us to see, but we can shrug; we can turn a blind eye. And so He lets it come, what we want — and everything, us, it all goes black.

There is light at the table, these open pages filling with it.

Isn’t that what Paul is saying? When, in light of everything, we don’t turn to God in thanks, God gives in to what we want — and turns us over to the dark …

Turn in thanks and everything turns — and God doesn’t turn away.

And there is this: If all the dismembering wickedness in the world begins with an act of forgetting — then the act of literally counting blessings literally re-members us to God. This is the making whole.

After lunch, I clean off the counter, gather up the halved squash and their inners, and afterward turn to the journal and jot down another note of thanks, for the time and the light to see by.

For all these halves, they are finding their wholes.

Father God, You are the Begetter of grace. Forgive me for being a forgetter of thanks. This is no trivial thing. It leads to wicked things. Hear the cry of my heart: Forgive me for not giving You thanks. If thanks is the highest form of thought — make it my first thought. Turn me toward thanks first — so my life doesn’t turn into the last thing I’d hoped for. Turn me toward You first — first things first means to give You thanks first.