Certainly it is true that the gifts of God are many, and that God knows everything – ranging from our needs to the desires of our hearts – before we even utter a thought regarding them. And I believe it is true that God blesses us with a constant stream of gifts so numerous that many of them are taken for granted: our senses of sight and sound, taste and touch, sunrises and sunsets, friends and family. The list is infinite, really.

Even so, in the midst of all of this great gifting, we would benefit from pausing to give ourselves a heart-check:

Do we sometimes mistake the gifts of God for a relationship with God?

In other words, how much of our thought-world regarding God is based upon some sort of give-and-take relationship (God gives, we take)?

Relationships, even the most common, are rigorously complex. How much more a relationship with a Source infinite in being-ness… not only that, but one who does not audibly respond to the persistent dialogue and chatter of our minds?

We have our sacred texts. We have our intuitions. We have spiritual friendships and perhaps fellowships. We have an inner consciousness or spirit upon which we draw for understanding of how God might be guiding us. But ultimately what we really have is a well-intentioned faith that somehow continues to draw us nearer to the heart of what we perceive as “G-D.”

Maybe this is why people of faith so often frame their relationship with God based upon how they perceive they are being blessed by abundance or lack, or by what doors are being opened versus closed and why all that might be. Maybe it’s just easier to frame things this way because these seem to be a more concrete way of keeping score with whether we are walking with God or not – maybe they are the closest to a tangible response we can discern or discover?

But is this way of relation with God really relational? Are there other ways to have relationship that might take us more deeply into the way of this mysterious G-D we seek?

For instance, when I think of a relationship with God, I think of how I understand God’s unfolding or Presence within the universe. If God is love as my sacred text (the Bible) declares, then what does love do and what does love look like in action? This is an important question because when I seek to answer it by the way I live my life, in a very real and concrete way I am joining with and entering more deeply into my relationship with God: Sort of a ‘like father, like son’ kind of relationship.

By framing relationship with God in a way that calls me to enable God to extend into the world through me, I am opening myself up to be more relationally involved with God as God’s love becomes my love – and the same with God’s empathy, compassion, peacemaking, forbearance, embrace, etc.

And so as each day comes to a close I can sit back and reflect upon the ways and depth of my relationship with God via my participation in God’s activity and presence. The gifts of God are still there, but they are secondary to the ultimate and deeply intertwined call to be God to a world so much in need of God’s presence, of God’s touch.

Recently someone did this with me – it wasn’t as much what they were saying as much as it was something I felt they were projecting – giving me ‘credit’ (of sorts) for thinking something I wasn’t even thinking. And so the more I thought about what I wasn’t thinking about…well, the more offensive to me it became. And as this person has been a friend for some time, there was ample baggage I could heap on the issue. I wanted to tell this person, as a roommate of mine in college used to say, ‘Hey, don’t throw your muck in my backyard!’ I wanted to say ‘deal with your own stuff but leave me out of it.’

Subsequently, I was offended. Royally offended!

But then I began to own something someone told me a long time ago when they said, “Nobody can offend you; you can choose to take offense, but they cannot offend you.”

In a lot of ways, that is a good reminder. It jibes with many of the teachings of Jesus that would enable us to even consider responding to our enemy by ‘turning the other cheek’ or ‘carrying their load’ or perhaps going beyond the call of duty in not just giving someone the shirt off our back, but in ‘giving them our coat’ too.

At play in all of this is the egoic self versus the true one. The ego always tries to separate us, to make us strive for equality if not superiority. And any challenge to what we say, do or think is often internalized and, well, taken personally.

When our children were young and one of them would come crying because they were called a name, we always used to ask them: If someone called you purple would that make you purple? This usually brought a smile to their faces pretty quickly. And so it was, as I contemplated what I felt had been done to me, it also (slowly… v-e-r-y slowly) began to put a smile on my face as well.

I had to pause and ask myself what it was within me that would cause me to take offense? I had to ask why I would give someone such power over me – I mean, I disagreed with their version of who I am and what I was ‘really’ getting at, so why not just drop it and move on?

The ego (and I’m using this in the sense of a false, versus true, self) is most often in protect-and-defend mode and resentful of anything slightly resembling a personal attack upon our thinking, our actions or intentions… so much so that should we ever find ourselves having the power and being faced with a dare, our egoic-self just might turn rocks into bread or jump from the highest part of the Temple just to prove our point.

All of this makes me even more in awe of Jesus and the way he carried himself in the midst of what was, perhaps more times than not, a hostile environment. He didn’t often take ‘personal offense.’ Why should he give power to others when he rightly realized the One who had ultimate power?

So, have you been offended lately? If so, why did you choose to take offense? Or better yet, if we have chosen to take offense, can we see the peace that would come from choosing to revoke that choice?

That is a power from on high.

For me, the word ‘righteous’ (and all of its derivatives) is such a word. It is one of those religious-sounding, antiquated words that we may be better off reframing. For instance, ask most people what they think when they hear the word ‘righteous’ and I’m betting they say something like, “the need to be more pure and holy; to be more disciplined in avoiding sin.” And if they did say something like that, let’s say as they strolled through the local mall or conversed at your favorite coffee shop, what would people overhearing such a conversation think?

Here are the words in that sentence that are more apt to drive people away rather than compel them to draw near: righteousness, pure, holy and sin. One sentence, four religious terms – some of which carry what a lot of people would consider to be impossible dictates, i.e., their internal response being something like, “Righteousness?! I find it impossible to be pure, holy and sinless.”

I’m not saying (as SBNR folks are often accused of from pulpits large and small) that those words aren’t important or no longer have any meaning and are in need of being re-defined so that we can avoid their demand for a radical change in lifestyle – the point I’m driving toward is that if they hold potent truths within, but have been so overused in ‘preachy’ conversations the world-over, is it not worth exploring alternate ways of making the same point?

And this brings me back to the word ‘righteous.’

For me, righteousness is about reintegration. It’s about taking me out of my Humpty-Dumpty-egoic-false-self world that all my pieces might be put back together again. It’s about helping me gain my bearings that I might once again discover true north, get back up, and continue the journey anew.

I like the idea that this G-D I seek, the One too distant to grasp yet always near enough to touch, makes me new every morning by reintegrating my true self and therein my world.

That’s what I need.

Reintegration.

I don’t need more religious sounding words reminding me of standards I’ll never adequately be able to keep along with bucket loads of daily reminders that I am, and my life is, an abject failure. (The voices in my head do that job just fine, thank you very much.)

And I don’t need a lot of well-meaning religious people telling me not to sweat it – that G-D makes us righteous, it’s not something ‘we’ do. That means nothing if I can’t get a grip on the term in ways that speak to the deepest part of who I am; ways that allow me to participate more meaningfully.

Now, to think that G-D makes me reintegrated each day and moment-to-moment as I seek the reign of G-D in my life – well, that seems to do it for me!

We might even think in terms of being ‘extruded’ – forced out under pressure.

As I look around the world these days, I see plenty of evidence telling me that things are unworkable. Just name a sector – government, religion, business, education – that isn’t chock-full of disasters.

While I sympathize with the need to reform the entire health care system, the way we’re tackling the problem doesn’t exactly instill confidence in me that things are/will be done well. The partisanship over the entire process was enough of a disaster to make the entire nation wake up, rather than join in… but will it? Probably not, which is too bad, because the disaster we call government is too great to ignore.

And what of religion? You know what…I don’t even want to go there. Too much of a target and too easy to hit. Disastrous. Simply disastrous.

And then there’s the business sector. Way to go Wall Street! Keep it up and soon you’ll all have homes surrounded by armed security guards, bars over your windows, police dogs roaming your yard trying to keep out the people who used to comprise what was once called ‘the middle class’ of our country. But not anymore… or at least not for long. Your companies have screwed them over so bad and so across the board in the name of the almighty buck that there’s little left for them to do but continue downward toward the poverty level as you continue climbing the ladder of wealth by walking up their backs.

And what of our educational system? How’s that working?

My daughter teaches third grade in a public school. Kids are great, parents are a mess – so much so that the other day one of her students drew a picture of her shooting one of her classmates with whom she was upset. My daughter asked, ‘Why are you acting like this? What is wrong?’ The little girl explained, ‘My parents are getting a divorce and it’s all my fault.’

And if it isn’t the children or parents acting out, it’s the school board or the teachers or ‘you name it.’ Everybody, it seems, is focused on pretty much everything other than teaching and giving our youth the best opportunity at an education possible.

Add it all up and there are plenty of good reasons to see that very little in our world is in good working order these days. And so I hope that many of us are, indeed, adding it all up. I hope we’re taking note of the disasters and pointing them out to others and possibly even discussing creative ways to change things.

Disasters, though trying and difficult, can also bring us the hope that change for the better just might be inevitable. But then again, if we waste our disasters and/or continue to produce greater numbers of them in multiple areas, it’s possible that we’ll just be left coping with an entire collapse.

Today, I’m going to be hopeful that such a collapse does not await us. But only if you’ll join with me in working toward the greater good! So, what do you say… shall we start making these disasters count?

What is even more difficult is that many of the things on our radar screens are really worthy of our personal investment. But by doing so, by giving in and yielding to their call, it isn’t long before we begin to realize that we’re stretched too thin and not doing anything really well.

And so the call for this weekend is to give ourselves permission to rest, to reorder our lives and maybe even to give ourselves a mental break by not constantly playing the ‘should’ card – you know what I’m talking about – we say things like, “I really should…. (fill in the blank).” But this gets us nowhere. And more than anything else, it isn’t a very nice way to treat ourselves.

The potential list of ‘shoulds’ in our lives is endless. It always has been. It always will be. That is a fact. Accept it. Deal with it. Learn to laugh at it and mock it when it attempts to convince you otherwise. You are the one in control, and unless you manage that infinite list of ‘shoulds’ you’re going to go nuts… and so is everyone else around you… because you’re going to drive them there!

Take a break. Relax. Bask in the knowledge that your very purpose for walking on this earth has been fulfilled by way of the life you’ve already lived. Anything else you accomplish from this point forward is merely icing on the cake.

So, today – this weekend – don’t ‘should’ on yourself.