Praise God Anyway!

Altogether I have lived in Hawaii’s capital, Honolulu, for 17 of my 85 years, during the period of 1967 to 2007. For most of our time there, my wife and I belonged to Calvary by the Sea Lutheran Church in the district of Aina Haina. At one point four of us men congregants discovered that we were all born in 1939. So we established an informal 1939 Club and would do things together like occasionally going out for breakfast or lunch and sharing about our lives.

One of the members, Dr. Arthur Harvey, was not a Lutheran at all but an ordained American Baptist minister from Maine. For those of you unfamiliar with things Baptist in the United States, the American (or northern) Baptists are quite liberal unlike their confrères in the Southern Baptist Convention. So Arthur had no problem serving as our director of music. (Our pastor for 30-plus years was the iconic Pastor Douglas R. Olson, who hailed, as he liked to say, from the Land of Ten Thousand Olsons, i.e., Minnesota, and had been a star quarterback and wrestler at that ur-Lutheran institution of higher learning, Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Arthur, the rest of us knew, had had a particularly difficult life. His wife suffered from a number of chronic illnesses that kept her from being able to do much while his daughter was on one or several spectrums. Yet he always seemed not only calm and content but also full of a joy that expressed itself in frequent smiles and laughter. As I member of the church choir that he directed, I saw first-hand how consistent his upbeat behavior was. At one of our 1939 get-togethers, we asked him, “Arthur, how to you manage to keep your composure and sense of humor given the difficulties you’ve been facing for so many years?” His response has certainly influenced me ever since and, most likely, the other two ‘39ers in our club besides Arthur.

“Well” he explained, “as a young minister I worked for several years as associate pastor at an American Baptist church in northern New Jersey. The senior pastor, who was about to retire, had had a very difficult life but somehow managed to keep an even keel and even seemed despite everything to be content. When I asked him how he did it, he said, ‘I just praise God anyway!’ So I adopted that practice myself, and it has served me very well over these many years.”
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Following suit, I have found that this is one of those simple life techniques that can really help, like my daily practice of coming up with something to say thank-you about for a minimum of ten times a day. Now in the week following the 2024 U.S. Elections, many of us are disappointed with, even distraught about, the results, the so-called trifecta, with Republicans in control of all three branches of government, and a vengeful Donald Trump back for a second four-year term. As a faithful Christian, now Episcopalian, I have already begun ramping up my thank-yous and following Arthur Harvey’s example to praise God anyway. Want to give them a try? 

Calvary by the Sea Lutheran Church, Honolulu, Hawaii, where we ‘39ers once worshiped.