God Didn't Cook Dinner

What if your gratitude to God is actually causing a devaluing of the people around you?

Recently, my wife sent me a video from a creator who offered a unique approach to how we think of gratitude. Specifically, her practice goes against what we often do.

"I thank real people for doing the things that they like to give credit to God for."

She suggests that doing this would lead us all to have "a lot more appreciation for each other and for ourselves." Admittedly, she's approaching this subject from an anti-religion point of view. But I think this is an insight worth exploring.

A couple of examples illustrate this idea. Consider someone recovering from a successful surgery. When we get the report that all went as hoped, we might exclaim, "Thank God for that!" While there is nothing wrong with expressing gratitude to God, in this moment, that statement alone tends to neglect quite a few "real people" who played massive roles in the outcome.

Could we also thank the surgeon whose skilled hands, years of experience, and commitment to the craft did the physical work involved? What about the anaesthesiologist who allowed you not to feel pain while the procedure happened? What about the team that tended to all your needs before and after the procedure and made sure you had everything you needed?

Or imagine getting ready to enjoy an elaborate dinner and thanking God for the food. This is so common it likely sounds strange for me to even mention. But what about the person or persons who actually cooked the meal? What about the person who shopped for the ingredients?

Even more problematic, consider someone who didn't help with the dinner themselves and then, rather than thanking the person who did, directs their thanks to God. I suspect quite a few men might be guilty of this. It's a bizarre kind of piety that manages to thank God and overlook the person still holding the dish towel.

Our limited expressions of gratitude also contribute to the strange idea that God moves in the world apart from people. Remember that when God answers a prayer, there will usually be one or two people involved. To neglect the one is to neglect the other. It sees God as disconnected from creation, and it sees people as disconnected from God.

As I write in chapter eleven of The Edge of the Inside:

God’s “physical” interaction with the world isn’t about muscling circumstances into place. It’s about partnering with creation. God partners with you, me, the cranky barista, the exhausted parent, the star forming a million miles away… all to bring about beauty. When we choose to offer our own bodies for the sake of God’s Spirit, we literally make God physical.

As the Apostle Paul teaches us, “Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). God doesn’t need a separate body when we collectively become the Temple.

The very idea itself is poetry. When God, as Spirit, partners with God’s physical creations, the creation itself embodies the Spirit of God into reality. Christians have often missed the point of this verse and claimed that their personal body is the temple of God and must be honored (which usually is applied to not getting things like tattoos or piercings). But Paul is using this idea in the plural. You all together become the temple of God. God doesn’t need a building when people make God manifest. Therefore, we should never mistake a spiritual God as absent.

This Spirit is moving, calling, and healing, not as an alien invader from “out there,” but as the love that holds reality together from the inside out.

So when you abstractly thank God by discrediting the way God moved through the person who did it, you are actually discrediting God too. But consider this nuance: if God partners with creation and works through people, then thanking the surgeon is, in effect, thanking God too. And it honors the physical person within earshot who would be encouraged by it. If you are only going to acknowledge thanks to one party, it would be better to highlight the person. 

The good news is that we can thank the people who are doing something for us while also thanking God holistically for all of it. But let us stop participating in the destructive theology of giving token thanks to God at the expense of appreciating the people around us. It's not loving God more to not love and appreciate the work of others. Even Jesus couldn't sum up the essence of the Hebrew Scriptures without including both a love of God and a love of others (Matthew 22:37-39).

We might connect the two directly by saying something like this: "God, thank you for using [name] to provide [this experience] for me." We don't need to be anti-God to be pro-people. But we can indirectly become anti-people by being narrowly pro-God.

So the next time you feel like giving thanks to God for something, don't forget to say it to the person standing in front of you.

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Photo by Douglas Fehr on Unsplash