Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 22: Gratitude for a Life
God is sovereign. Here’s my gratitude list.
First, I’m grateful to him for delivering me from my Communist addiction in 1973 and drawing Susan and me to Christ in 1976. He shows patience and long-suffering love when we stumble, go our own ways, and clearly misunderstand the gospel of grace. Apart from the wonder of the Holy Spirit, I repeatedly wander.
I’m grateful for all those who have played a role in teaching and discipling me, even if we differ in some secondary understandings. We are still brothers and sisters, made siblings by Christ’s sacrifice. The Bible tells us the church will be made up of people of every tribe and tongue—and that will be part of its beauty.
I’m grateful to Susan, but she insists that I leave out mushy stuff. I’m also grateful to our four children and six grandchildren (so far). I’ve purposefully left out their names and almost everything about them to preserve their privacy, but every day they’re on my mind, as Willie Nelson might sing. May God shed his grace on all of them.
Our church sings a Porter’s Gate hymn, “Establish the Work of Our Hands,” based on Psalm 90. I’m grateful for institutions Susan and I helped to build: a crisis pregnancy center, a school, and a church. We pray they will survive us and continue to testify to God’s goodness in Christ.
I’m grateful for the way Bible reading inspires ideas, including my thinking about compassionate conservatism and biblical objectivity. I pray that others will take up what is useful. I’m grateful for the opportunity to write books. Each one demands a sacrifice of time and attention from my wife and
others as I dive deep into research and writing. My favorites are The Tragedy of American Compassion and The Story of Abortion in America. I hope others, including Reforming Journalism and Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden, are useful.
Susan often teases me about my numbers fixation. Lament for a Father shows how as a young child I entertain my mother by adding triple digit numbers in my head. Part of the reason I become a young baseball fan is the joy of computing batting averages. So here are lifetime (thus far) numbers that may be foolish boasting but are also part of my gratitude to God: zero broken bones, one cigarette smoked, two times requesting salary increases, three times requesting salary decreases, four times riding horses, six times reading The Lord of the Rings to children at bedtime.
For a while, I count whenever I can’t sleep, with a notepad next to me. I attend seven different schools from the first through twelfth grade, live in fifty-one different places for at least one month, volunteer in some way for sixty-one organizations, sleep for at least one night in 922 different places. (Going for one thousand!) On a driving trip, Susan and I count up 157 fast-food/casual dining chains that we have patronized.
Some numbers reflect God’s kindness to me, since any of the travels they represent could have been disastrous: forty-eight trips across the Atlantic or Pacific, 193 different airports arrived at, two million miles flown. If you’re depressed at some point, do your own counting and see God’s traveling mercies.
My list includes some numbers achieved through God giving me his gift of time: visits to all fifty states plus Puerto Rico and Guam, all 254 Texas counties, and every current major league and spring training baseball park. (Including some now closed, I’m up to eighty.) Since starting to track steps via Fitbit in 2015, I’m at about thirty-two million—but who’s counting?
Some juxtapositions are interesting. I’ve visited thirty-six Civil War battlefields and worshipped at least once in churches that are members of thirty-six different denominations: I hope they do not become battlegrounds. Forty-seven is the number of anniversaries Susan and I have celebrated and also the number of long car or plane trips taken with one or more of our children. That seems appropriate.
This numbers fixation can lead to some useful lessons. For example, a desire to do at least ten thousand steps per day gets me to 534 straight days before a heel ailment called plantar fasciitis sidelines me for a while. I learn that God gives us Sabbaths for a reason.
I’m grateful that God did not make me handsome, athletic, wealthy, or oratorically eloquent. After interviewing many major league baseball players and politicians and hearing about the opportunities for lust and greed they face daily, I’m grateful to have been without attractive qualities that lead to easy
opportunities to sin.
Leaving World has been a blessing in giving me the opportunity to concentrate on the book about abortion history and another book on the moral vision of American leaders. I also thank God for my research positions with Discovery Institute and Acton Institute, and for allowing me to dig into homelessness through stays at homeless shelters, weekly columns, and an eventual book: compassionate conservatism, third time around.
Looking back from age seventy-three, I see the J-curves, with pivots leading to initial disappointment but then turning upward to blessings. Often it’s only in retrospect that we grasp the kindness of God’s providence. We should not just count our blessings. Sometimes, we should count what at the moment seems like a curse and thank God for it.
Some curses, though, are just curses. Travel in Cambodia, Chile, China, and Cuba (just to mention the Cs) has shown me that political extremes beget extremes. Germany and the Soviet Union are paramount examples, but strongmen emerge when people fear takeovers by the right or the left and are willing to back anyone who will stop their worst nightmare. Repeatedly, people don’t see until it’s too late the new nightmare created by those they supported out of desperation.
José Gironella’s The Cypresses Believe in God (English translation, 1955), set in Spain during the five years before the civil war begins, remains my favorite novel. Gironella describes how Spain from 1931 to 1936 polarizes to the point where people can “tell from the trademark in a man’s socks where he stands on the mystery of the Incarnation.”
Early in the novel, saintly César gives free classes to poor children and sees happiness, but by the midway point “even in the children’s eyes there was evidence of a certain disturbance. Now, as César looked at them carefully, those children frightened him. They were growing and they would absorb all the poison the neighborhood exuded.”
There’s some of that in the United States today. Morning dog walks in my neighborhood are peaceful, but I remember a trip to Barcelona where Susan and I walk the same streets George Orwell and José Gironella walked during the 1936–39Spanish Civil War that left one million dead. When walking old Jewish neighborhoods in Ukraine and Lithuania, I can imagine the terror of those whose neighbors turn against them. Please join me in praying that God will preserve us from neighbor-against-neighbor warfare in the United States.
God has already written out our future, but in some way our prayers figure into it. I still wonder why Abraham, who questions God about his planned destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, does not question God’s instruction to sacrifice Isaac. I now know, though, that chapter 11 of the book of Hebrews tells us Abraham believed God could raise Isaac from the dead. It’s a foreshadowing of the crucifixion of the Father’s beloved Son. I still wonder whether Jepthah executes his daughter. Scholars still speculate about it. I do know that the book of Hebrews praises Jepthah alongside Gideon, Samson, and David, all notorious sinners at times. They “through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice,” and did much more.
I’m grateful that God exists and Christ’s resurrection is a reality that provides hope as death approaches. Joachim Neander’s last stanza is:
Praise to the Lord,
oh let all that is in me adore him!
All that has life and breath,
come now with praises before him!
Let the Amen sound from his people again;
gladly forever adore him!
Amen.
