This post originally appeared on Rev. Angela Denker’s Substack newsletter, I’m Listening. 

There is a version of ingratitude that affects even those who claim to be anti-consumerist, especially within the church.

It extends outward from religion into creative types like artists and musicians and writers. And parents of young kids. And family members.

And … shoot. It’s all of us.

I’m talking about that notion to focus on “the ones who got away.” The ones who didn’t come. The non-RSVP-ers, which can be a large group if you’ve ever hosted an event, a wedding, or a 6-year-old birthday party.

I don’t think it’s just me, but we’ve all gotten kind of flakey in this year 3 of life with COVID-19. I noticed recently that our local salons refused to book appointments without a credit card on file, such was the huge amount of no-call no-shows impacting the books of stylists and estheticians.

I was talking to another mom/pastor friend earlier today about this great temptation to think that the thing that heals us is going to be some kind of blank nothingness-infused Netflix binge. Earlier today, I talked to a musician friend who told me that he’d realized a year or so ago that he’d entered a phenomenon called “post-burnout-burnout” where he was wandering through the world in a sort of semi-numb state, and even playing music couldn’t ignite his former sense of passion in him.

He stepped away for a bit from his full-time job, but for what it’s worth, on the morning I spoke to him he was playing music again, full of life and passion and all the things that made him feel alive.

He was no longer in post-burnout-burnout. And as I talked to him, in the quiet calm of the seminary chapel after I preached there last week, I felt the edges of my recent myopic exhaustion and overwhelm begin to melt away.

Gratitude will do that, of course. But it’s more complicated than just “giving thanks” or making lists. I think the life-changing gratitude we’re all hungry for entails a new way of seeing, a new way of remembering, and a new way of forgetting.

This is my ode and my thanksgiving to the ones who were there.

It may or may not be inspired by 10+ years in ministry, where every Sunday is like throwing a birthday party and you’re not sure if anyone will come, as well as more recently inspired by that experience I had last week preaching chapel at the seminary where I earned my M. Div.

Since I graduated in 2013, having decamped in my third year for the West Coast and finishing my final fourth year remotely/at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, I’d had mixed feelings about going back to Luther Seminary. It had long been the largest Lutheran seminary, but numbers had dwindled since I started in 2009, due to a number of factors, political tension in the denomination, a general lack of interest in post-graduate studies in a field that pays low wages with diminishing congregants, financial woes at the school, and whatever else. Life changes; the world changes; it’s not all bad.

Still, sometimes I have a hard time with change. I’d want to walk back into seminary and have everything be like it once was, when I was 24 years old, engaged to be married, and generally without much of a care in the world. I’d want to see the old friends I’d listen to music on the boombox with in the basement at “God’s Gym,” or walk down to the nearby school where we played pick-up basketball. I’d want to walk to the bookstore, which no longer exists, or pray in the secondary chapel, which is also now closed.

Maybe I used the seminary as sort of a way to manage my grief about growing up, about the changing world and the changing church, and ultimately, the changing me. My thoughts and beliefs had changed a lot since seminary. I no longer imagined pastoring a megachurch or speaking at an Evangelical conference. I was chagrined about the church’s and my own potential, as well as the world’s.

And still Luther Seminary stood there, 25 minutes from my Minneapolis home, at once venerable and full of history and promise and itself too somewhat chastened by the difficulties of the past few years and by many who had been pained and damaged in its midst, for various reasons.

I admittedly was not the best chapel attendee as a seminary student, though I promise you I really did do all the reading. I did! Ask my roommate and the permanent indentation made by my behind in my living room reading chair, faded and ripped with overuse.

Anyway though, I had some memories from chapel. Students strewn across three sides of the chapel pews, with the far-right side reserved for faculty members, who would watch and judge that day’s preacher and examine the word for potential heresies. I’m kind of joking here, but it should be noted that that former faculty section was once called “the Sanhedrin.”

When I stood up to preach last week, though, I noticed that the faculty section was empty. A few professors were simply seated amongst the students present, and a few members from outside the community, one a beloved pastor who had driven in from the suburbs to say hi to me. I was struck again by sort of that empty sense of memory forever changed. What had become of those wise scribes? Some had retired, some left in disagreement, some were still there but just not at chapel that day. Some taught primarily distance students now, admittedly a much more practical way to manage seminary education. Who knows, really. It has been a number of years now. Time passes. Things change.

This writing though, it isn’t about them; the ones who got away or went away. In the past I was often one of them: spending most of my 20s and early 30s moving across the country and back again; trying out different cities and churches and enjoying every minute of adventure and love and newness.

Now, nearly six years into our time in Minneapolis and with no plans to leave the home we’ve spent countless hours fixing up, I’m part of a new group. The ones who stay. The ones who were there. And I have a new appreciation for this historically under-appreciated group.

THANK YOU. Thank you to the ones who just keep showing up. Week after week. The ones who sit comfortingly in their all-but-assigned pews or chairs in the rural sanctuaries that make up the majority of our nation’s churches. The ones who drive school buses and show up each morning and afternoon to get our kids to school safely. The ones who teach, day in and day out. Those who say, OK, I’ll serve on that committee. I’ll decorate. I’ll help with the meal. I’ll clean up.

Thank you to the ones who were there. The ones we’ve too often ignored in a quest for more numbers more eyeballs more money more consistency more security. The ones who were there get understandably tired of this constant quest for more and new and better. I think of my denomination’s drive to get “1 million new young and diverse members,” and I think it kind of smacks of this economic pressure for more more more more more. An engine that never has enough fuel. A beast that is never satisfied.

So much for gratitude.

This discontentment can seep into our individual lives as well. You find yourself obsessing about the ones who weren’t there. The rejections. The no-shows. The no-replies. The ghosting. The choices you didn’t make. The paths you didn’t take. The unanswered prayers.

And all the while, people like the folks sitting with me in chapel last week are standing there in front of you, jumping up and down.

“We’re here!” they’re yelling. “We’re right here!”

It’s my family, my husband, Ben, my kids, my parents, my brother, my longtime friend from high school, Lyz.

It’s that encouraging email, that message you forget too quickly, the mom who says her kid really likes playing with yours …

Who is it for you? Who’s showing up for you?

Sometimes, if you ask me that, and I’m in that pit, I’ll be stuck in bitterness. And if you say, “Well, God is there for you!”

I won’t be able to see God. Nothing. Legions of the ones who weren’t there stand in lines like ghosts, haunting my night and day.

So this new year. I’m going to start instead by counting. Purposefully. Slowly. The ones who were there. Again and again. And as I do so, in their faces - in your faces - I see God.