Delete the word Entitlement from your life

I returned from India last week after a family vacation. At the airport, the immigration officer gave the passport back to me and said two words that really warmed my heart. He said: Welcome home. This country has been my home for the last 31 years, all of it in Coral Springs. During those years, we moved 3 times, but always stayed within the city. When we were tempted to move away, I told my wife, why go anywhere else? Coral springs has “everything under the sun.”

By the way, Parkland has “Everything under the moon” and so we are complete.

So we gather tonight as residents of two beautiful cities in America, Coral Springs and Parkland, but above all, we gather as children of the same divine parent, as one family of God. We gather as spiritual siblings, to thank god for blessing us with each other and also thru each other.

One question I am always asked this week is this: Do you celebrate Thanksgiving in India? And tongue in cheek, I would say:

Unlike in the USA, in India we thank God every day of the year, not just on the last Thursday of November.

As much as we are profoundly thankful this Thursday, I encourage you to be permanently grateful every day of the year. And permanent gratitude has helped me to be a happy and joyful person even in the midst challenges and struggles during the last 25 years.

I say last 25 years, because before that, I was sleep walking through life. I was under the hypnosis of socio-religious-cultural conditioning. I had good days and bad days, like anybody else. I was grateful when I had a good day, and miserable when I had a bad day. Bad days outnumbered good days.

Gratefulness was a life event, not a lifestyle.

Today I have an app on my phone called Daylio which helps me track my moods and activities every day. It is an easy and fun app because you can rate your day by touching an emoji. No writing is necessary. So at 8 PM every night, my phone chimes and the app will ask “Paul, how was your day? And five emojis will pop up with these choices: awesome, good, bad, average, awful.

And I always rate my day as awesome or good because as far as I am concerned, any day above the ground is a good day.

As a hospice chaplain, I deal with death and dying on a daily basis. So, if I am breathing it is a good day, regardless of the bad experiences of the day.

Like the one I had two weeks ago on November 6th. My entire family was supposed to travel to India on November 7th for a long awaited family reunion. I had booked the tickets in March 2019. The bags were packed. All of us had taken time off from work. The pet sitters were lined up for our dog Sally. We were so excited. My family in India was counting hours for our arrival. But when I accessed the Lufthansa website for on-line check-in, the message said:

Flight canceled. Sorry for the inconvenience.

It was 7 at night. I went into a panic mode and began calling the airline and the travel agent. Neither of them answered their phones. I was furious, frustrated and flabbergasted. What am I going to do? Rearranging a trip to India for a family of 4 within 24 hours, is a horrendous task. Canceling the trip was unthinkable.

I spent the next six hours searching travel websites and talking to travel agents and finally by midnight I got 4 tickets for almost double the prize. It was an emotionally draining and frustrating experience to say the least.

So when the app reminded me to rate my day, I thought of rating it as awful but I couldn’t. I still rated the day as good. Because, at least we were all alive and healthy. The first 18 hours of that day were exciting. It is very difficult for me to rate a day as bad because of this verse from Psalm 118:24 percolating in my consciousness: This is the day the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it.

How can something that the Lord has made, be bad?

Also these words of St Paul inspires me: He says, Rejoice always, not when things are great, be thankful in everything, and everything means everything.

I believe it is possible to create a lifestyle of permanent gratefulness and sustained joy. Let me tell you a story:

Few years ago, a lady named Jane began attending my bereavement support group. By the way, I facilitate a BSG at my church on Mondays at 3. That was a commercial for my church.

Jane was grieving the loss of her mother who was her best friend. Her mother was 96 when she died. Week after week Jane talked about what a wonderful mother she had; how lost and depressed she felt without her mother. And how unfair it was for God to take her mother away from her.

Jane was obviously suffering from the why me syndrome which is the greatest barrier to a life style of gratefulness.

One day, when Jane was marching along her pity parade, Nancy spoke up. She was a 48 year old woman who had lost her only son to suicide. Now, that could be an “unfair” deal, and she had a legitimate right to ask the “Why me?” question. But Nancy surprised us all when she began to speak.

This is the gist of what she said:

Forgive me for saying this, but as sad and angry and depressed and desolate as I am, I don’t ask, “Why me?” because, when I ask that question, it sounds like I wish it was somebody else in my place. I don’t wish my plight on anyone else. It is a horrible place and I don’t wish any parent to go through that lonely road of tragedy and tears. Instead, I ask the question: “Why not me?” which brings a sense of peace to my heart.

At some point in our lives, all of us have asked, why me? I stopped asking it a long time ago. Instead, like Nancy, I ask Why not me?

First of all, Why me? is an unproductive question. There is no verifiable and acceptable answer to that question. Humans have tried to answer it with platitudes and cliches like: “it must be God’s will”, “God wanted him more than we did”, “he is in a better place” etc. I cringe when I hear those phrases because people don’t know what they are talking about. Be patient with those who offer such easy answers. They mean well. It is their way of coping with the paradox of life.

Second, Why me? Is prompted by a lack of appreciation for the mystery and paradox of life. Whey someone dies at age 30 and another at age 90? Why some couples are able to complete 50 years of marriage while others get less than 5? Nobody knows.

Third, Why me? Is a victim question prompted by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, wondering why God is picking on me? A new understanding of God might help us not to ask that question or at least rephrase it.

Fourth, Why me? originates from a sense of entitlement, that life owes us certain things, that we are entitled to a certain number of years, and that we deserve a happy, healthy, trouble-free life. Life offers no such guarantees. If you are looking for guaranties, you are not looking for life.

When we live with expectations and a sense of entitlement, every little disappointment becomes a tragedy. Every sad experience begets bitterness. Joy dries up in our hearts, and smile fades from our face.

Always remember that None of us are entitled but all of us are empowered.

We are empowered with a brain, if we care to use it; we are imprinted with the divine image, if we choose to acknowledge it, and activate it; we are blessed with gifts and talents, if we decide to use them.

I encourage you to delete the word entitlement from the dictionary of your life, and replace it with gratitude, and watch what happens. You will be in for a magic carpet ride!

If you happen to live in this parcel of the planet called the USA, you are already ahead of 99 percent of the population of the world. Having lived in 3 countries and traveled in 13, I can say with confidence that in spite of all the problems we have here both national and personal, we are still much better of than many other countries. That is why people are risking their lives to come here. I don’t see anybody standing in line at the Indian border desperately wanting to get in.

Imagine bombs falling in your neighborhood. Your house is blown up. You have to take what you can in a bag, gather your family and leave the area. This is happening to the Syrian refugees as we speak. The civil war in Syria has displaced nearly 5 million people and they live in refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt.

These refugee camps are like huts in the middle of barren deserts. About 42 people have to share a bathroom. They have to stand in line for hours to use it.

They have to stand in another line and register at the UN refugee resettlement office, hoping they will be chosen to relocate to another country. If they are chosen, the vetting process takes anywhere from 18 months to two years.

If you read the harrowing stories of these families, you will start seeing your life in a different way.

There is a story about Jesus healing ten lepers. Nine of them took their healing for granted and went their way. One of them came back to thank Jesus. Jesus specifically points out, that the leper who came back to thank him was a foreigner.

Speaking of foreigners thanking Jesus more than the natives, I had a visitor from India a few years ago. We were taking a walk along Atlantic Blvd, and he said: “I don’t think we will ever have a road like this in India, so straight, so smooth and no potholes.”

Indian roads are filled with potholes, stray dogs, wandering cows, and pedestrians, in addition to bikes, cars, buses and trams. In some cities, traffic blocks can last up to an hour during peak hours. I told my wife, I will never complain about traffic in Broward county again or any other county for that matter.

Here is a foreigner appreciating a road, while we often sit in our air condition cars, get angry with the driver in front of us because he is not moving fast enough. We don’t notice the beautiful road. We take it for granted.

What is also special about the grateful leper is that, he saw that he was healed and returned to thank Jesus. He saw what had happened to him.

So the second obstacle to a lifestyle of gratefulness is that we don’t see who we are and what we have.

After all life is hard and heavy for most of us. Most days, we are walking around with the weight of our problems related to broken relationships, financial issues and other unexpected crises. Because of of these accumulated frustrations, there is always an edgy annoyance at the surface of our lives than gratefulness.

That is why it is all the more important to open our eyes and see everything with fresh eyes. To see how wonder-filled our seemingly mundane life actually is, with all its troubles and tragedies.

We won’t get a new life, but we should get new lenses to clearly see the life we already have.

During thanksgiving, we hear about a practice called 30 day gratitude challenge.

I invite you try a 365 day gratitude challenge.

Pick a blessing each day, and there is plenty to pick if you really open your eyes and look. For example, after returning from India on Thursday night, I picked taking a shower as a blessing.

In my brother’s house in India, there is no shower or hot water. We had to collect water in a plastic bucket and mix it with boiled water from the kitchen and use a cup to pour it over the head. After doing that for two weeks, a hot shower in my house in Coral Springs was a glorious experience.

When mundane activities like taking a shower, washing dishes, walking your dog and sweeping your floor, feels like glorious experiences, you are on the path to a life of permanent gratefulness.

Let me end with another glorious experience I had few months ago. I was enjoying “two slices of pizza and a pint of beer for five dollars,” with my wife, at Lucky’s Market on Wiles Road, which by the way is a good deal and a cheap date.

And my phone rings. And the caller said: “This is officer Johnson from Coral Springs PD. He asked if I was inside the store. I said yes and ran out and the officer was standing next to my car. I had left my driver side door open. He wanted to make sure that my car was not vandalized. I had tears in my eyes and profusely thanked the officer.

I am grateful to live in a city where on a Sunday night, a police officer will take the time to check out my license plate, locate my phone number, and call me to make sure that my car was okay and that I was safe.

Open your eyes and start seeing the amazing ways God has blessed you so that you can live gratefully every day of your life.