Shameless Celebration

I know that the world is several versions of mad right now.

I know that pessimism and grimness sometimes seem like the only responsible choices. 

I wake up at night and think about war and pesticides and global warming and fundamentalism and disease and crime. I worry about the world we’re creating for my baby boy. I get the pessimism and the grimness.

And that’s why I’m making a shameless appeal for celebration. Because I need to. I need optimism and celebration and hope in the face of violence and despair and anxiety. And because the other road is a dead end. Despair is a slow death, and a lifetime of anger is like a lifetime of hard drinking: it shows in your face and your eyes and your words even when you think it doesn’t.

The only option, as I see it, is this delicate weaving of action and celebration, of intention and expectation. Let’s act, read, protest, protect, picket, learn, advocate for, fight against, but let’s be careful that in the midst of all that accomplishing and organizing, we don’t bulldoze over a world that’s teeming with beauty and hope and redemption all around us and in the meantime. Before the wars are over, before the cures are found, before the wrongs are righted, Today, humble Today, presents itself to us with all the ceremony and bling of a glittering diamond ring: Wear me, it says. Wear me out. Love me, dive into me, discover me, it pleads with us.

The discipline of celebration is changing my life, and it is because of the profound discoveries that this way of living affords me that I invite you into the same practice.

Celebration is a tap dance on the fresh graves of apathy and cynicism, the creeping belief that this is all there is, and that God is no match for the wreckage of the world we live in.

What God does in the tiny corners of our day-to-day lives is gorgeous and headline-making, but we have a bad habit of saving the headlines for only the scary.

There are a lot of good books about what’s wrong, what’s broken, what needs fixing and dismantling and deconstructing. I read them, and I hope you do too. But there might be a little voice inside of you, like there is inside of me, a voice that asks, “Is that all? Is this all there is?” And to that tiny, holy voice, I say, “No way, kiddo, there’s so much more, and it’s all around us, and it’s right in front of our eyes.”

To choose to celebrate in the world we live in right now might seem irresponsible. But I believe it is a serious undertaking, and one that has the potential to return us to our best selves, people who choose to see the best, believe the best, yearn for the best.

• Through that longing to be our best selves, we are changed and inspired, able to see the handwriting of a holy God where another person just sees the same old tired streets and sidewalks.

The world is alive, blinking and clicking, winking at us slyly, inviting us to get up and dance to the music that’s been playing since the beginning of time, if you bend all the way down and put your ear to the ground to listen for it.

What can you do to intentionally celebrate small things this week?

Excerpted with permission from Celebrate Every Day by Shauna Niequist, copyright Shauna Niequist.

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Your Turn

What are you celebrating? This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad it in! (Psalm 118:24) Today, find inspiration to celebrate the small, humble gifts from the Lord! ~ Devotionals Daily