By Traci Hubbard
After Thomas Edison was credited with inventing the lightbulb, a journalist quickly accosted him and said, “you made a thousand mistakes…a thousand you said, a thousand failures, before you finally got it right.” Edison took a moment while he looked gently into the young man’s critical eyes, and then said, “Son, it took a thousand steps to discover the truth.”
In her book, “Think You’ll Be Happy: Grit, Gratitude, and Grace”, Nicole Avant writes:
I was home alone on the evening of Tuesday, November 30, 2021. Well after midnight—I’d been asleep for hours by this point—something told me to look at my phone. When I did, I saw something you never want to see in the middle of the night: about a million missed calls from my brother, Alex, and the same from my husband, Ted, who was away on a work retreat. With my heart racing, before I could even work out what was going on, my husband’s name appeared on the screen again. I quickly answered his call and before I was able to say hello, he said something to me that would change my life forever, “Love, you’ve got to get up, get dressed, and get to Cedars—your mom’s been shot.”
Surrounded by the darkness of night, I froze. “This is a dream,” I thought. “This isn’t happening. I just have to wake up. Wake up, Nicole. It’s a nightmare. Wake up.” There are some words that make no sense and will never make any sense. Never, never, never. “What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “Where was she? Was she out with my father? Wait, what time is it?” Yet even as I asked, I realized quickly that there was no time for questions. I needed to go to my mother.
My mother, Jacqueline, was the person in our family who held the pieces together when things were about to fall apart. She never stood on the sidelines. Like the queen of a kingdom, in moments of crisis her instinct was to act. For my entire life I saw her deliberately move through the world with grit, grace, and gratitude. In that moment after I received the call, I left myself. Maybe I became my mother or maybe I became more deeply myself. I am not sure, but what I do know is that my mother needed a woman like her right then.
Life often throws us curveballs. We face setbacks, challenges, and difficulties that can make us feel stuck. Sudden Loss shatters our hearts. Betrayal and broken relationships deeply wound us. Unfulfilled dreams want to draw us back to then but then is not a place to live. Then will never be able to fill us with the resources we need to be alive and whole now, to love and choose joy now.
The first 4 chapters in Paul’s first letter to the church in Rome, center on how human beings miss the mark, we sin, and sin means “missing the mark” and when we miss because we have chosen ourselves over the ways of Christ, our roots begin pulling away from our Source, from the one who is with us, holds, us and loves us at all times. Romans chapter 5 deals with, “Okay, this has happened – whether you chose it or people outside of your control chose it, now what? Now who are you going to be? Now what? How are you going to live in the now? Are you going to live in Faith or Fathom? Fathom being trying to change something that happened in the past or are you allowing an event or a person to hold you prisoner to another time and place.
Why do we keep going back to the past and asking, “what if” or saying, “if only…?” As human beings, we have been given freedom to choose where our minds live. Backwards or in the now. We have the freedom and inner resources to become self aware and say to ourselves, “That’s not the story I want to be. I choose to center myself in who the Sacred is, not who wounded me, and if I wounded myself and know better, I will be better.” And folks, this way of living always begins in our minds.”
The science of psychology tells we experience the initial “hit” of suffering for a brief moment. We prolong our suffering through ruminating – through focusing our thoughts on the pain, which means, we are choosing pain over healing, we are choosing to go back, instead of coming back to the present moment and the opportunities to love, laugh, and live with grit, gratitude, and grace. Paul tells the church in Rome, connect to the grace in God’s love for you, and be grateful that now that you know better, you are free to connect to holy grit and be filled with gratitude and joy that you would have never known without that event.
Grace allows us to be present in the moment. It allows us to own, accept and forgive the things what we cannot change so we can come back into the grit, strengths, love, and ways of the Spirit that available in us and around us right now. And when we come back to the now, to who we want to be, how we want to love and live, we are immersed in an inner sea of gratitude that spills over into everyone and every living thing around us. In Romans chapter 12, verses one and two, Paul goes on to say that we are transformed from who we were, from how we are thinking and living, by the renewing of our minds, and that this act of intentionally being aware of how our thoughts shape our lives, is an act of worship – and worship is something that flows from gratitude.
I know this sounds like a long bumper sticker theology, especially to someone who is deeply grieving, or for one who is choosing to be in the quicksand of the past and angry at the world for being stuck, or for the one who is struggling in forgiving themselves for doing or saying things that wounded those they love the most. Friends, what matters the most is who do we choose to be now? For those of us who choose grit, grace, and gratitude, wrapped up in forgiveness, as long as we have breath, we will be in constant motion moving through the now and moving forward.
In January 2016, TCU, Texas Christian University, and the University Oregon, were playing in The Alamo Football Bowl Game in San Antonio, Texas. Two nights before the game, Trevon Boykin, TCU’s star quarterback was in a bar with some of his teammates. He was being scouted by several NFL teams who would be at the Alamo Bowl Game. He was caught up in his celebrity and beer to the point that he started a fight and hurt someone. Gary Patterson, TCU’s coach, suspended him from playing in the game, and made a phone call to Bram Kohlhausen, a senior on the team to replace him. Bram was a walk-on quarterback, who had been in his parent’s home, since his father died two weeks prior to the game. At half time, TCU was down 31 – 0. Oregon had stomped all over their hopes and dreams.
In the second half, Bram, led his team to a 47 – 41 victory over Oregon in triple time. He accounted for four touchdowns and was named the game’s most outstanding offensive player. His performance in the Alamo Bowl is considered one of the most memorable in TCU and College history. Trevon chose to stay in the bar scene, talking about how his coach stole his future from him. On February 27th, 2020, Trevon was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to witness tampering and an assault on a person named Bailey. Trevon lived looking back, Bram lived in the moment because he chose what was needed to come back.
Gary, TCU’s coach, came back to the second half of the game wearing a different shirt. During an interview after the game, a reporter asked him why he changed his shirt at half time. Coach Patterson replied “During half time, the boys and I changed our perception. We changed our minds and our ways around how we were playing the game. So, I changed my shirt, that way when any of the players looked at me, they were reminded that we were not going back to the way we were thinking and playing in the first half. We have changed our minds, and we’re coming back to who we are.”
The last Time Nicole and her mother were together was on Thanksgiving, 2021. Jacquie asked her daughter what she wanted her to make for dessert, and Nicole said, “Oh Mama, there are always too many desserts for all of us, whatever you have made will be fine.” But like most mother’s, Jacquie kept asking until Nicole finally said, “Okay. Okay, your sweet potato pie.”
There were a dozen desserts that Thanksgiving, and to Nicole’s excitement, no one touched the sweet potato pie, and she was going to take it home and eat the whole thing by herself. When Nicole decided it was time for her to leave, she went into the kitchen, and the pie was gone. Someone else had beat her to it. The next day, she texted her mother, looking for some sympathy while sarcastically adding, “Now Mama, don’t you bake me a sweet potato pie. I’m just whining. LOL.” But then she heard the Spirit tell her, “Do not send that text. Your mother will not think it’s funny”, so she erased it and sent the emoji happy face with three hearts that her mother loved, and then the next moment, she received a message from her mother, that included a picture of a freshly baked sweet potato pie. Her message read, “Okay, think you’ll be happy now.” In nine hours, Nicole was going to her mother’s house to get her sweet potato pie. But as we know, that didn’t happen. What happened no one can change, and allowing her thoughts to constantly take her back to that horrible night when her mother was murdered, was not who she was, and not who she wanted to be. Her thoughts as she drove to the hospital were, Oh God, give me the strength not to hate this man.” Nicole was centered in her faith. The day after the murder, Oprah called her crying and asked her how she was doing, Nicole replied, “I am standing in my faith.”
While we have breath, we need to realize that we are not finished writing our story. And while we breathe, we need to check in on our thoughts and NEVER NEVER allow them to take us back to what was. A whole and healthy life doesn’t unfold that way. I did not arrive safely to church this morning by keeping my focus on my rearview mirror. If you haven’t come back from something, there’s no time like the present. I promise you, that living a self-aware life will empower you with grit, grace, and gratitude, and this always makes for a great story. May we leave this moment, each one of us, choosing to stand in our faith and turn on our light, even if it takes a thousand steps.
May it be so, amen.
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