A dear friend and colleague, Sharon Alexander, is now seeking ordination and is also a lawyer. She recently observed,
“at my firm the other lawyers always joked that I did not simply think outside the box, I didn’t even acknowledge the box’s existence in many cases – this helped me get through a lot of complicated corporate messes”
That is not only a wonderful personal characteristic; it is an important spiritual move as well.
I am not a great fan of the power of positive thinking or (as it is sometimes described in religious circles) the power of positive confession.
It strikes me that people who reflexively argue that you just need to “think differently,” live in denial. Or they are just fortunate enough to have never encountered an intractable problem — yet.
That kind of unrealism is always disheartening to people who have faced profound, irreversible losses and I have always avoided offering easy answers for jut that reason. The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, and the devastating news of a life-changing diagnosis are all new boxes that cannot be completely ignored.
But there is a sense in which we are all called upon to not only think outside the box, but refuse to acknowledge its existence. For Christians, that is not the power of positive confession or positive thinking…
It is power that rests in the work of God.
It is faith in the work that God has done.
It is the courage to acknowledge that our surroundings might have changed, but they are not a decisive judgment on our lives.
It is the confession that declares, “on the third day…God did not acknowledge the box.”