It started at an after-work happy hour. Grousing about the all-but-notional pay raises, certain decisions made by the leadership team, the way those decisions were communicated. At first I mostly sat quietly and listened — after all, I loved my new job! What did I have to complain about?
But over time, I joined in the conversation. As my colleagues shared their frustrations, I realized that I had a few, too. By the time I had a dead-end conversation with my boss about an office policy that seemed inequitably applied, I felt downright indignant. A little pebble of discontent had lodged itself in my shoe, and I couldn’t shake it out. After all, I deserved better — we deserved better! In a matter of just a few months, I had gone from loving my job to wondering if I should look for a new one. Suddenly there were slights and shortcomings everywhere I looked.
Being dissatisfied, it turns out, is pretty easy. Like children who won’t play at a wedding because it’s too fanciful and won’t play at a funeral because it’s too glum, I would rather stand aside and criticize than make the effort to experience joy.
Jesus knew a little something about this. In today’s gospel, you can almost see him throwing his hands up in exasperation.* He’s been talking about both his ministry and John’s, and it seems as if it suddenly hits him: no matter what we do, people aren’t happy. Crowds flocked to hear John’s message of repentance and Jesus’s gospel of grace in equal measure, only to end up questioning and mocking them both. Why? Because that’s the easy way out. We critics can feel satisfied, if only temporarily, in our smug assurance that we know best. Even if it means standing on the sidelines, missing out on opportunities for joy.
Fortunately, Jesus didn’t worry too much about the critics. He knew wisdom wasn’t to be found in public opinion. It was only found in choosing love, over and over again.
Can I tune out the chorus of discontent and find ways to choose love? To fight for what’s best without giving in to our culture of grievance and dissatisfaction? It’s work, but work that’s worth doing.
-Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church
- Is there an area of your life where you are the critic on the sidelines?
- What would it take for you to lay down that role and choose to love instead?
For Further Reflection:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
I hesitated to share this quote because of the source; Teddy Roosevelt, for all of his forward-thinking about preserving our natural treasures in national parks, held racist and xenophobic ideas. I wholeheartedly reject his white- and American-supremacist ideology, which falls deeply short of the choice to love I wrote about. And yet, I think he gets it right about the “cold and timid souls” who stand aside and criticize. Should you choose to reflect on Roosevelt’s words this week, I invite you to consider what it means to be “in the arena” fighting for a more just, equitable world for all.
