Mumbling in Freedom

 

This week we are huddling and hovering around the question, “Why do we grumble and mumble?”  There might be a few different reasons:

1.      Culturally conditioned ~ I grew up in a family where complaining was a nightly litany at the dinner table.  I was schooled in spotting the brokenness and less-than-perfectness of life.  This was re-enforced in school where “feedback” was just a nice way of pointing out the fumbles and stumbles in red ink on my paper.  Or job reviews where my boss started with the positives, but I always knew the negatives (or growing edges) were coming.  

2.     Acceptable ~ we reward grumbling by joining in saying things like, “You think that is bad…” then filling in your bad experience.  We continually click on stories that share all the woundedness of the world, then complain about how awful the internet is without ever realizing that what we click drives the content online.  We tend to listen to negativity but see positivity as being Pollyanna (not good) or naive (even worse!). 

3.     Lives rent free in our mind ~ current science tells us that our brains are incredibly malleable ~ like Play Doh.  And research shows that if you show people just five minutes of bad news it causes them to think the worst and that it will happen to them!  And who among us stops reading the newspaper or scrolling our social media after five minutes?  Um, no one.  All we needed was to see one image of shelves empty of toilet paper to rush out and buy all we could get our hands on a few years ago.  What we consume ~ consumes us.

4.     Cathartic ~ sometimes we need to get things off our chest, venting can be healthy, but it can be a habit too.  I can fall into the trap of endless laments rather than finding good in each day. 

5.     We don’t know what else do to with our emotions ~ remember a few weeks ago I offered the idea that emotions are energy in motion ~ our emotions send us in a particular direction.  And our brains ~ wired the way they are ~ love to find ways to rationalize and intellectualize why we should feel the way we feel.  Our brains, like a mini-Sherlock Holmes, go out searching for evidence that supports how and why we should feel the way we feel.  Plus, we live in a culture of individualism where we cling to the belief that no one can tell us what to do or feel.

I wonder if you might have a few more reasons to add to this list.  When you find yourself always feeling like the weather pattern in your soul is always rainy with the chance of worst weather tomorrow, can you ask yourself, “Why?”  Scripture tells us that God provides, even to these less than grateful people wandering in the wilderness.  When you are muttering and mumbling can you take deep breath, slowly exhale, and ask yourself, “What might God be up to?”  Or, “How might God be present even here and now?”  May these questions help all of us be open to the One who hears our laments and seeks to turn our mourning into dancing ~ not because everything is suddenly pony rides and chocolate rivers ~ but because goodness is God’s prayer for each of us every day.  Amen.