A Bad Attitude and a Good Father

Hear my cry, O God,

    listen to my prayer;

from the end of the earth I call to you

    when my heart is faint.

Lead me to the rock

   that is higher than I.

                --Psalm 61:1-2

Prepare yourself, because this is going to be a long post. A week long, in fact.

This week, I have found myself oppressed by various waves of homesickness. It’s been more than a month since I have seen the faces of any of my family or friends. I found myself stomping up the escalator in the Metro station on my way to work, coffee mug in hand, grumbling in my head: “I hate this city. It’s stupid. I hate everything about it. I hate Virginia, too. I hate the whole flippin’ state!”

This summer, I hardly ever complained. I was at home, cooking with Mama, playing guitar, not working. My life was so hard. It was grueling, waking up when I wanted to and doing art projects and swimming all day, let me tell you. Nevertheless, I congratulated myself on my good attitude. I managed to maintain a sunny disposition through the three months of complete and total vacation I had.

I know—an accomplishment, right?

Then I put on big girl clothes and moved 1,000 miles away from Mama and started getting up at 5:00 a.m., giving up control of my daily life to the monster of a service-based job. I totally expected my good attitude to last. Why wouldn’t it?

Shockingly, I have experienced a bad attitude this week. The observable symptoms of a bad attitude are (among others): whining, complaining, general self-righteousness, scowling, and sometimes (in rare cases, or if you’re seven), crying. It’s a disease that commonly afflicts teenagers. (I know none of you have ever had a bad attitude, so I felt the need to explain it in clinical terms.) People give all kinds of reasons for having bad attitudes. However, the heart of a bad attitude is usually selfishness, self-righteousness, and an attitude of entitlement.

That’s right. I said it.

A bad attitude is this phenomenon that happens when you feel like you have been done wrong. Most of the time, it creeps up just when we have convinced ourselves that we are in control, that we are capable—and then we are unexpectedly reminded that we aren’t. In other words, a bad attitude may look like a series of justifiable complaints, but when you dissect a little further, what you find at the center of your heart is the idea that, not only do you believe that you know best when it comes to planning every detail of your life (self-righteousness), but also that you deserve to be in control of your circumstances (entitlement), and that you deserve to be comfortable at all times (selfishness).

Paul said, “Do all things without grumbling or disputing” (Philippians 2:14). If you have a bad attitude, right now you are thinking, “Well, Paul was a saint! He may have suffered, but he was called!”

I got news for you (and for myself): we are all called. We are all saints (hence the constant referral to the readers as “saints” in pretty much all the epistles). There was nothing special about Paul other than that God called him to a more public spiritual walk. So you’re not getting out of this one.

I can’t say, “But I’m different from the apostles.” Because if I follow that statement to its logical end, I find some pretty nasty narcissism: “I’m different….I have always been comfortable and in control. I am a strong individual who knows what I want, and I should have it, but my life is stealing this control from me. I basically have no ability to plan out my day to the minute, like I did before…this isn’t fair.”

“If God loves me, why doesn’t He let me have control, like I used to?”

I told you—it’s ugly.

Obviously, God’s love for me is completely independent of whether or not I’m comfortable. I just happen to have been very blessed in my life. I hate to use the word, but I’m spoiled. God has let me have so much circumstantial peace and ease, and so much narcissistic control over my daily plans, that I am a big baby when it comes to the slightest change. I shouldn’t be acting like the poor kid I saw last week who didn’t want to do his worksheet: “I’m tired! I had to get up so early in the dang mornin’!” Honestly, that kid probably had more right to complain than I do. He probably didn’t get a cup of coffee.

But let’s get back to the “if God loves me” thing.

Finish this statement: “If God loves me, then why….”

What part of yourself are you holding back from your Father because you think He ought to treat you differently?

Maybe you don’t have an answer. Maybe it’s just me. I know it’s stupid that I think God’s love for me depends on how comfortable I am. None of the men who followed Jesus were comfortable. They were nomads (a lifestyle I am beginning to identify with, since I spend 3 hours a day commuting, roundtrip). And they certainly weren’t comfortable when they were being tortured or killed or marooned for their faith. Yet John, in his forced isolation on the Isle of Patmos, wrote abundantly of his Father’s love.

You know how he knew God loved him? Not because of anything God didn’t or wouldn’t do for him, but because of something He had already done: sending His son Jesus to die and finish the work so that we could follow Him to heaven.

Put out of joint….

So my bad attitude, my complaining, is on the surface a result of unpleasant or unexpected circumstances. But the real reason lies in my heart: I have forgotten, for a moment, what Jesus has done, and who I am in Him. I have forgotten that my life was never mine to control in the first place.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.—Colossians 1:19-20

I mean, He’s not just a nice guy—He’s a savior. And you know what He’s saved me from? Having to be in control.

Somehow this week I have failed to appreciate that.

Why is being in control such a big deal to me? Because, in the still-stony parts of my heart, I think I am important. I think I am entitled to be in control. That’s what the TV tells me, right? Every billboard I see says that I am important, I am special, I deserve to have things however I want, whenever I want. But let’s remember that this is a lie. Let’s remember in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you.

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons….but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Therefore lift up your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

--Hebrews 12:7-13

Oh yeah, I forgot that drooping hands and weak knees are also symptoms of a bad attitude. Apparently, the recipients of this letter were also having trouble with that. Maybe they had to get up at 5:00 a.m., too.

Let me just qualify one thing right here: I definitely don’t believe that God wants us to be uncomfortable. In fact, I believe the opposite. He wants to bless us. That’s biblical: “What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent…?” (Luke 11:11). But I think—and the Bible backs me up on this—that, like a good disciplinarian, our Father wants us to be comfortable no matter what—which is actually better for us. The goal is not for all of our little everyday comforts to line up, for our happiness to depend how much we control our circumstances; the goal is that all of our hearts will belong to Jesus, so that our joy depends solely and completely upon Him—and that is something that cannot be taken, unlike the little comforts of sleep and our favorite foods and even time. The goal is for the Holy Spirit to “strengthen [our] weak knees” by His gentle discipline, so that we can yield “the peaceful fruit of righteousness”—and “share in His holiness.” He wants to take “what is lame”—the entitlement and narcissism that cripples you—and heal it, to keep it from breaking you further.

I think people sometimes confuse the words discipline and punishment. Punishment is just negative consequences in response to an action. Discipline—or discipling—has a higher goal. Discipline is creating a relationship to model correct behavior and avoid problems before they happen. To be a good disciplinarian, you have to make disciples.

Sound familiar?

The best parents are disciplinarians. They are invested in their children and spend lots of time with them in positive ways so the children are more inclined to do what they say when it’s important. A bad parent only interacts with the child as a reaction when the child’s behavior affects his/her own comfort level. A good parent will teach a child to think for himself by modeling good behavior, which requires copious amounts of quality time. A bad parent will ignore his/her child until the child begins to scream in the grocery store, because only then is the child’s behavior embarrassing or irritating.

The world is a bad parent. It offers only a series of consequences based not on our own well-being, but on how our behavior affects the selfish motives of culture—and we develop a bad attitude because we resent this system that controls us, yet we have convinced ourselves that we are in control.

Conversely, God is a perfect Father—one who is so deeply invested in every little piece of our hearts that He makes His home there and bends and shapes its curves like a gentle potter.

Going back in this chapter of Hebrews, we find that, in our “struggle against sin,” we “have not yet resisted to the point of shedding [our] blood” (v. 4). True enough for me. The author of this text says, “let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings to us so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”—and here’s the key admonishment—“looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (v. 1-2).

I have never taken much interest in this verse because, let’s face it, I am about 0% competitive, and the metaphor of running a race just doesn’t appeal to me. But now that I know what sin really is—that grumbling, questioning, complaining attitude, which has its roots in my own selfish desire for comfort and control—I can understand the laying aside every weight part. I know what it’s like to run with a heavy weight. (Carrying a backpack while chasing the Metro bus…need I say more?) When I am chasing after Jesus, I don’t want my self-motivation and self-righteousness to “cling so closely” to me. Ew. That just sounds wrong.

I feel despair, because I don’t know how to “lay it aside.” But luckily, the answer is right there: “looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” Not only is Jesus the founder, the reason for, my faith, He is also the one who makes it perfect. Yes, that word is perfect.

Sharing His holiness….

Instead of releasing control to God, I have tended to use Him as a means of control. For example, the other day I was running a few minutes late getting off work, so I prayed that the trains would come fast and that I wouldn’t miss my bus. It wouldn’t have been a disaster if I’d missed my bus. Another one would have come right behind it. But that was the bus I wanted, because it got me home earlier, so that I could do what I wanted to do. The person I was focused on in my prayer was not Jesus and glorifying His name. It was me, getting home and getting out of my work clothes.

But do you know what the most beautiful thing was? Even though I was a few minutes late, and on a normal day would probably not have caught it, the bus just happened to be running exactly the same few minutes late I was. It pulled up just as I ran up to the stop. He let me have what I asked for.

But then there was yesterday. I decided to drive to my school for the first time. A weird light came on in my control panel, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I decided to keep driving until I got to work and check it then. It’s too bad I missed my exit. And if you miss your exit in DC, you just put yourself out for about an hour, because that’s how long it takes to turn around. So here I am, with my control panel light on, and I’m lost in Anacostia, which is, statistically, the worst neighborhood in DC. I stopped at a gas station and figured out that my tires were low, and tried to fill them up, but the machines were broken (which I only found out after I had used the sketchy ATM inside, had to buy some TicTacs to get quarters in change, and was approached by two random men as I tried to figure the machine out). The gas station workers were not helpful or understanding at all from their view behind the bulletproof glass. Needless to say, I decided I’d rather ride on the rims than continue there, so I navigated my way to work. I called my mom and asked her to pray for me as I was driving, because I needed to hear her voice.

But the whole time, I wasn’t really scared. I believed that God would protect me. He always has. I knew my tires wouldn’t blow, and that no vagrant was going to murder me and or even take my smart phone. What I was actually upset about was my loss of control. I didn’t want to be late for work; I didn’t want to deal with putting air in my tires (on the car that I prayed for, no less); and I didn’t want the stress of having to figure out where I was and right my route. I just wanted things to go the way I wanted them to.

My Father got me to work. He got air in my tires, later that day, with no trouble. He got me home. But He didn’t make everything go so smoothly that I felt like I was in a convertible commercial, or that I felt like a celebrity. In fact, I felt like a nobody—someone who was not worth helping. And the world looks a lot different from that perspective. I felt that I was being attacked…and, from what I know about the devil, I can say that I probably was. He has done a lot of things to try to scare me and my program manager away from my school—not the least of which was to try to convince me to have a bad attitude.

Paul wrote, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

Rejoicing in your sufferings does not sound like bad attitude behavior. Neither does hoping. But notice the order: to get to the “hope,” you have to rejoice in your sufferings…which means you have to suffer. When I am comfortable and in control, my life is easy. What do I have to hope for? What reason do I have for God’s love to be poured into my heart?

I’m not saying that God got me lost in Anacostia. As I mentioned before, someone else was responsible for that. But in that situation, I learned to pry just one more finger off of my death grip on control.

So this is what I am learning: how to not just use God as a way to control my life through demanding things in prayer, but instead to develop a daily relationship with Him so that I can be filled with the waters of everlasting life (John 4:14). How fondly John must have recorded these words of Jesus, sitting in exile with no physical home or comfort. My desire is to know the healing power and the joy of that kind of resurrected relationship with Jesus.

Thinking about that makes me angry with myself for giving in to a bad attitude. I have been disappointed in myself, because after a summer of Jesus highs, I have reverted right back to stressing and complaining whenever I see an appropriate opportunity. I’m not saying we don’t have hard days, or that I should expect perfection from myself. I know I shouldn’t. But that doesn’t stop me from being disappointed nonetheless, especially because my “hard days” are not nearly as hard as many people’s, and I am afraid I am much more immature than I thought.

But I’ve got more news about bad attitude days: God isn’t surprised. You may be disappointed in yourself (which only feeds the bad attitude, at least in my experience). But, as my pastor in Nashville said once, “To say that God is ‘disappointed in you’ is to imply that you surprised Him.” God is not surprised at our bad behavior. He’s used to it by now. He saw it coming 1,000 miles (and ten million years) away. I may be disappointed in my immaturity, and surprised about how much I still need to grow, but He is not. And His patience is long, much longer than your bad attitude can last.