(an excerpt from David Crowder's Book, Praise Habit)
"Tragedy always comes. If it hasn't come for you, it will. not the losing-your-homework kind or the having-to-flush-your-goldfish kind, but the kind that leaves you stripped. The kind that tears from you all the ideas about living you once believed untearable. Mine came my junior year of college, and it came in a phone call. It was my mom. She said, "David, something very terrible has happened." The words that followed were bombs. As they came hurtling toward me through miles of telephone wire, my muscles turned liquid, and when she finished, I was left wilted on the floor, and God was not there. At least I could no longer find Him. And I had no idea where to begin looking again. The places I used to frequent, I no longer trusted. In seven minutes everything I had thought about everything was dramatically different. College is hard enough without something detonating in the middle of it... There was a lot of sorting out to be done concerning most things and where they were to be placed in this faith I carried or that was carrying me, and it was proving to be a daunting task. And then in the middle of this sorting, an explosion. I was covered in shrapnel, clotlessly bleeding. And when I had bled out, when there was nothing left, I found Him. And He was not where I thought He was. Nor where I had put Him last.
He was in a Chick-fil-A sandwhich.
I have loved Chick-fil-A my whole life. But when your world implodes, nothing tastes good. I was poking at the thing and a thought hit me that there is one part of the sandwich I don't enjoy. There is about a quarter of the breast that consistently dissolves into a lesser grade of meat and soggy breading. I pulled the top bun off and tore the portion away that didn't look appealing. There was a natural break in the meat. It was easily separated. I put the top back on and ate. It was the best chicken sandwich I had ever eaten. I wadded up the foil sandwich bag and smiled for the first time in a really long while.
It may not sound like a real breakthrough, but for me it was truly cathartic. In a small, decisive moment I was aware of what was GOOD and took effort to peel away what wasn't and in the process became re-enamored with the Giver of good. I remembered our beginnings, when that statement "It was good" was first uttered. I thought about how the BAD was never intended. Things started to come to life. Blood that had slowed to a crawl began to find its way through my veins again.
The consequences of this discovery were huge. If He was in a sandwich, where else could He be found? Every moment was becoming holy. Nothing was nonspiritual. This was habitual praise - a perpetually sacred acknowledgment of the Giver of every good thing. A relentless embracing of good and discarding of bad with an awareness of the one who in the beginning spoke those life-affirming words.
When good is found and we embrace it with abandon, we embrace the Giver of it. This book explores that journey. This book is written in hopes that you begin to find God everywhere. Yes, in church on Sunday at 9:00 a.m., but also in the seemingly mundane. In traffic on Tuesday at 5:15 p.m. In the colors of a sunset. On the other end of a tragic phone call. Every second is an opportunity for praise. There is a choosing to be made. A choosing at each moment. This is the Praise Habit. Finding God moment by revelatory moment, in the sacred and the mundane, in the valley and on the hill, in triumph and tragedy, and living praise erupting because of it. This is what we were made for.
"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out." Romans 12:1-2
