Prosperity & Joy?-latest riff on Psalm 4, & excerpt from “killing justice: the taste of knives”, ‘coexisting with chaos’ section

“I, Lord, am asking, ‘When will you bring me prosperity? Let the light of your face shine upon me. Fill my heart with joy!’” Psalm 4: 6-7a

I donated fifty dollars last night to my church, the Westside Vineyard. That was my “widow’s mite”, my tithe, as it came to ten percent of the five hundred dollars I made this past month.

Why is that significant? Because for the decade between 1999 and 2009, during which time I earned roughly six hundred thousand dollars and donated both time and money to plenty of charitable organizations, I didn’t donate any money to my church. I didn’t even bother going to church. I was working as an immigration lawyer, and in doing so I was of counsel to Joseph, and he went to church every Sunday, sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, served as an elder, and tithed faithfully. Surely I could just ride on his religious fervor as a way of compensating for my lack thereof. I took my relative prosperity for granted, and would eventually pay a steep price for having done so.

Or, more recently, take the year between the summer of 2016 and the summer of 2017. In the summer of 2016, I was working two jobs, making roughly fifteen hundred dollars a month, and my beloved Pops and beloved birth mom Adele Priestley were both still alive. And while I was attending church throughout that year, once again I took my relative prosperity for granted, and failed to donate a dime to my church. By the summer of 2017, I was down to just one job, making around five hundred dollars a month, and had lost both Pops in the fall of 2016 and Adele Priestley in the spring of 2017.

So why, now that I seem to have reached the lower limits of my downward mobility descent, short of having no job at all, do I now finally feel the freedom to donate to my church? Because I can finally see just how miserable I was back when I was much more materially prosperous.

Both working with Joseph for that decade, and that second job I had for that year, were toxic work environments in which my soul was dying. Fortunately for me, my soul managed to crawl its way back to freedom both times, even if each time meant a further slide on the scale of downward mobility for me.

And now that I’ve finally allowed myself permission to begin grieving the loss of Pops in the fall of 2016, the loss of Adele in the spring of 2017, two of the people who’d managed to love me better than I’ve been able to love myself during my more than half a century on this planet, and the loss of my second job this past summer, I can truly say that, for the first time in more than eighteen years, I am finally beginning to remember what it once felt like to have the light of God’s face shine upon me, and to have a heart filled with joy.

Although I still ache for those, like my brother Derek (aka: Meister Smith) and my sister Shauna Giles Ryall, who both were in too much pain to be able to enjoy Christmas dinner this year, I am reminded of the fact that no matter how severe our current sufferings may be, they pale in comparison to the joy set before us. And, more importantly, that the joy found within us is greater still than the joy set before us. For Jesus had his baptismal vision in which he was reminded that he was God’s beloved son, just as I had Pops’ telling me to “take a deep breath” when I’d blown my law school scholarship those thirty three years ago, which was his way of letting me know that I was his beloved son, to give us each that joy within which nothing outside of us can ever strip away. So I am slowly learning what it means to make joy my ground, rather than my goal. And it was with that joy flooding my heart that I gratefully made my fifty dollar “widow’s mite” donation to my church last night.

image: https://www.miltongoh.net/uploads/7/9/6/9/7969926/499280670_orig.jpg

https://www.miltongoh.net/miltons-blog/followtheholyspirit

&, i kid you not, here’s what I found on that blog directly above the image found above: You don't have to tithe, you get to tithe.

(and that was AFTER I’d chosen the image above, & AFTER I’d added the line about Jesus’ baptism in my rewrite of the above chapter)...God certainly does work in mysterious ways...