Sacrifice of Praise

As a parent who spends much of my time with young children, and has for the past 9 years or so, I also spend much of my time on opposite ends of a particular spectrum - the Pride/Shame spectrum. One second they do something that creates a feeling within me that sometimes makes me feel as though that, were it not for my skin, I would explode in a hundred different directions. It starts with a lump in my throat and radiates slowly throughout my entire body and makes me feel 10 feet tall. Often times, in fairly short order, the pendulum swings to the opposite end of the spectrum, and they do something that leaves me loathe to admit they are even mine. This feeling, I am fairly certain, begins somewhere in the eyebrow region and progresses rapidly to the viscera until the rest of the body language follows suit and I am curled up like a pill bug hoping to fade into the wood work.

Just this afternoon at the lunch table, for example, Levi started hacking up a grape. Apparently, the grape was too sour for his delicate palate, and he had gotten it halfway down his throat before realizing he didn't want it. After some effort at coughing and gagging with dramatic flare, he regurgitated the grape into his hand and proceeded to put it back into the community grape bowl. Seeing nothing wrong with this, despite the disgusted response of his sisters and me, he continued on with his lunch. This is the same young boy who gave the window below the OPEN sign at Jiffy Lube a thorough tongue washing a couple weeks back. But he is also the boy who spent an hour helping me in the garden tonight without taking a break. He asked me for one of my garden gloves, and he went to work pulling weeds and keeping me company. I had anticipated that he would not be as much help as he was hindrance and attempted to send him off on a "fool's errand" or two at first to see if he would boomerang. He did and ended up being a great help for a child of any age - much less a 3 year old. And the pendulum swings back to pride.

I haven't always been very good at giving praise. To my shame, I all too often have a critical eye more than a positive vision. Encouragement doesn't flow as easily from my lips as I would like. It often resonates in my feelings or in my heart, but the words don't often make it past the gates of my lips. It is, of course, easier to encourage my children when they are meeting my expectations and staying closer to the end of the spectrum that gives me pride in them than it is when they are on the other end. My love for them obviously never changes, but I'm not sure they feel it as consistently as I hope they do.

Praise is, apparently, a sacrifice - true praise, that is. Flattery, on the other hand, is easily done, and it flows from insincerity. Its backhanded motive is to lift up the flatterer instead of what it appears to be doing - encouraging the flattered. It is a lie. Feeling truly positive toward another and expressing it unselfishly is a gift from God alone and requires sacrifice.

Psalm 54:6 ~ I will freely sacrifice to You;

I will praise Your name, O LORD, for it is good.

Hebrews 13:15 ~ Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name.

Can I praise God when He's not acting how I think He should? Can I sacrifice worshipful words when my heart is aching? I have met people who think that God is largely uninvolved in their daily lives for these reasons: If God really cared about every moment of my every day, how could He let difficult things happen to me? If He really cared about me, how could He let my husband lose his job? How could He let my child get cancer? How could he allow natural disasters? Therefore, in order to reconcile the fact that I don't trust God to move in my best interest - even if it appears difficult, I'll just believe that He's not working at all. That way, I can love Him at a distance - impersonally. I can't love/worship a God who would... fill in the blank. Isn't it easy to put God in a box you can carry under your arm? He's much more predictable and safe that way. My faith can't be challenged, and I will never change or grow, but I'll be in control, and I won't be vulnerable.

I have to admit that, in some ways, deistic theology (that which states God set the world in motion and let it spin, and everything that happens after that lacks His involvement) is appealing. It lets me off the hook. It relieves me of obligation to find out any more about Him. It keeps me from personal encounter. I don't have to change. I can just try within myself to be a better person. Most of all, I never have to offer a sacrifice of praise. I never have to thank God for giving me challenges. I never have to trust that He's using my hardships to help me mature. I never have to be one of those people who stands there with a dumb look on his face and says, "I know there's gotta be a pony in this pile of manure somewhere." But the problem with that theology is that I don't know what to do with the miracles. I don't know what to do with an obvious encounter with God. I don't expect them, and, as a result, I don't see them in my own life, but when I see inexplicable joys in someone else's life, I don't get it... or I just write it off to sentimentality and try to forget it ever happened.

It's easy to praise when praise is not a sacrifice... when I get the promotion I want, when I have a thriving marriage, when my children are healthy and well. It's easy to have faith and trust during those times. It's much harder when the God in our box is not acting like we hope He will. I have only to look at His creation to know that He is reliable - tides, seasons, daylight and night time, phases of the moon - all like clockwork. I also have only to look at the same creation to know that He is not predictable at all - the random beauty of trees, rock formations, flowers on cacti, gemstones in caves, kittens playing, my children... all of these things expected and unexpected at once - unpredictability without an ounce of chaos.

The sacrifice of praise He desires is derived from a heart that is trusting His heart to be good and involved to our best interest despite how it appears from our worldly perspective. Not to mention the fact that looking at an isolated season of our lives and judging it as bad is like standing very close to a beautiful mosaic, looking at one tile, and saying, "This stinks." Whether or not we believe it, He always warrants our praise. He has always deserved it. His actions are not just good - they are what determines what the word good even means. Yet He recognizes our temptation is not to give praise easily. (Luke 19:37-40) We want to withhold it - avoiding vulnerability, but if we can, we were never His.

I hope that I can learn to give praise - not only when it's easy - but when it is truly a sacrifice. He has already proved His love to me. What other way have I to prove my own back to Him - or even to myself? Praising Him for His blessings it not going to cut it. I can praise my own children for what I perceive is good behavior, but that won't prove my love. It's the praising of them despite their actions - for who they are - who I know they are - and the fact they are my very own. This is the proving out of my faith... the ability to take all from His hand and still believe that He's right there every moment and that He's being good to me. If I let my circumstances determine my level of faith, then I am denying the power that was given me. My faith will determine my circumstances, and not the other way around. To pass on this ability is to pass on life - the proof of what is not seen - the evidence of what I hope for.