Get Curious: Week 3 of The Uncommon Normal #GratitudeRipples Challenge
It was the kind of morning where rain threatens until it spills and you trust your senses over the hourly weather report. In Kentucky, you feel it in the denseness of the air when heavy clouds are about to let go. Usually, I pay attention, but it was early and I didn’t care if my hood smashed unwashed hair, so I kept my daughter dry with a small umbrella and let myself get wet while we waited for the school bus.
I hadn’t thought to grab a bigger umbrella. But another mom had the foresight and invited several kids to huddle beneath the canopy.
Then it struck me: Rain is an opportunity to share an umbrella.
It’s a chance to stop looking at what’s different about us and see instead how much we are all the same. All humans with multi-faceted perspectives, varying life experiences, personalities, and preferences. All wet without an umbrella.
Rain strips away our pretenses because rain favors no one, saturates us all equally. It doesn’t answer to our schedules, appearances, or preferences. It sets the pace, slows our hurry. Rain grounds us to the moment—the drum of the drops and the mist on our faces becomes more palpable than the worries that drain us. Rain downplays the categories our stuff shuffles us into. Here, as the rain bounces off our toes, we see we’re more the same than different.
Here in the rain, we are just us. Just us and our desire to feel safe, valued, noticed, cared for, and connected. Just us without many of the things we surround ourselves with to warrant our worth, just us without the counterpart to our battles, just us with our humidity-zapped hair and clothes damp where the umbrella doesn’t protect. Rain shows us the humanity in all of us.
What if there were less competing, comparing, and canceling our neighbors, and a whole lot more umbrella sharing? Seeing each other. Meeting each other with compassion and grace. Here’s what I’m aiming for:
Now, this is the goal: to live in harmony with one another and demonstrate affectionate love, sympathy, and kindness toward other believers. Let humanity describe who are as you dearly love one other.
1 Peter 3:8 TPT
The thing about watering gratitude is it will change how you see people, and how you treat them. Where gratitude grows, pre-assumptions whither.
Gratitude lifts our gaze, helps us notice the neighbors right in front of us. The ones raking leaves and hanging shutters, carrying in groceries and buckling babies into strollers, walking dogs and riding bikes. The ones who are more like you than you’d know at first glance.
Neighboring with a faith that ripples
Your mission this week is to pay attention to people. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Learn their stories. You’ll find ample to be grateful for as you move toward people and let the work God is doing inside you show.
Note how a ripple doesn’t choose where it goes. Who it touches. How it impacts.
It just moves steadily outward. Effortlessly. As if it knows: it matters less where it ends as how it goes.
A ripple doesn’t set out to be great, touch others, change the world. It simply is what it is. It makes its difference by doing what it’s designed to do: constantly moving outwards.
As we cultivate gratitude this month through the #GratitudeRipples challenge, we find that there is a letting go of the how. The who. The expectations. It’s not our role to decide who we will reach with our ripple or how they will respond.
Instead, we let gratitude do its beautiful, refining work. Soften our lines with compassion and empathy. Open our hands, get down deep into our thought patterns. Our words. Tone. Expression.
We let it pull us toward God, and toward people, simultaneously. Grow our faith, cause it to ripple. Teach us a new way to neighbor: where we stay close to God and let others in close enough to know the things God is working on inside us.
Your challenge: get curious
Your challenge for this week three of the #GratitudeRipples challenge is to make space for curiosity. Notice the people around you. Move towards them.
Our gratitude prompts this week are
Time – 11/15
Story—11/16
Margin—11/18
Observe—11/11
Reflect—11/19
Expand—11/20
Truth—11/21
Invite God to converse with you about each prompt. Ask Him what He wants you to let go, embrace, or apply. Don’t overthink your response. Just listen and lean in.
I’ll leave you with a few lines from Shannon Martin’s new book, Start with Hello, that paint a dynamic picture of curiosity leading to community:
As we set out to find our way to each other, our first step is to surrender to discomfort. It’s not a threat. It’s our guide. It means we’re learning to be human, together, in broad daylight—honestly and with courage.
p. 124
Next time you hear the drumming of rain, think of how it favors and avoids no one. Then do the same.
Observe the way of a ripple, how its joy is in doing what it was designed to do. And imitate it.
Let’s pray.
Jesus, You lead us in always moving toward people. May we imitate you. Stir our curiosity this week. As we make space to notice our neighbors and learn their stories, we trust that Your sufficiency will overshadow our lack.
I pray the words of Philippians 4:19-20 over you: “I am convinced that my God will fully satisfy every need you have, for I have seen the abundant riches revealed to me through the Anointed One, Jesus Christ! And God our Father will receive all the glory and the honor throughout the eternity of eternities! Amen!” (TPT)
May our curiosity and compassion, and the gratitude that swells and ripples, be arrows pointing to You.
*** You can read more of my reflection on rain being an opportunity to share an umbrella here.
By the way, if you don’t have the gratitude challenge graphic yet, right-click to save your preferred size to your device. Want to know more about the gratitude challenge? Check this post to learn more about how gratitude can have a ripple effect.
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