Faithfulness As A Pillar When The City We've Built Comes Down

This week’s been a bit tough. You know the kind – a proverbial freight train. You clean up street trash from the barreling boxcar with a six-ton elephant on your back and you’ll wonder if anyone on God’s green earth might come to you and say, “enough.” An appropriately timed Advent has me longing for these inside out bruises to be gone for good. Of course, none of which compare to those that plague my single friend at Christmastime or a dear relative that’s been locked away as her mind and her memory betray her, and especially not to the wife whose womb won’t stay full.

I’m immediately convicted as I finish that sentence and am reminded of a million ones like it as of late – ranking in order the greatest and the worst sufferers so that I might have some excuse to keep quiet about my own regular, layman’s grief. Prop it up to matter against the rest or let it go and die. Those are your choices. We all know of the blatant jealousy in comparing our good with someone else’s better. The bitter fruit of discontent. But I’m realizing this season that the seemingly humble (and often unconscious) undermining of our pain in the scope of a neighboring humanity’s is as nasty a disease as any. Taking the enemy in small and large doses, judging his best, most harmful work. You and I will pray for the souls who have it harder and resign to our place in the shadows of less and little suffering. That’s a sneaky version of pride, and we should call it when we see it.

For years I did this, and I do it still now when a stranger offers up their story and asks in exchange for mine. Bumbling around for key phrases that act as a match for brokenness, as if to relate or be helpful, I’d have to be a leper. Perhaps I’ve grown tired of contorting my testimony so that only badness shows through or maybe I’m learning about the gospel as just listening and sitting shiva with a brother. But in any case, my healing looks different than the leper’s, and is healing any less powerful for the normal, old sinner? The pastor’s daughter and product of a saved marriage. A year-old wife who makes coffee to pay the bills. And an anxious one who – without the work of the spirit – is prescribed an entire life of violent mood swings which, on a good day, calm to apathy.

At the beginning of the year, the Lord began unwinding in front of me this concept of faithfulness. You should know that I’m historically leery of these loaded words – the type filed next to Authenticity and the Evangelical Christian. I’ve been let down by them before and I’m not under the impression that I won’t be another time. These words are sweeping and are of the nature to be twined and twisted, overused or misused. Once whole and full, now soiled and stripped bare. Taken out of context and beaten to a pulp. As a lover of words and keeper of them, I feel the heavy weight – a dwindling glow – that comes from a falsified meaning, one intended to be good. Faithfulness. Be more specific.

So, he said, go to the corners where you’ve been faithful and find me there.

It wasn’t until a slew of disappointments had incurred an unpayable debt that I would know clearly what that had meant and would see what then remained. And it happens that way, doesn’t it? Wounded by one and knocked down by another and kicked by the next and at last left alone to survey, does anything still stand above this wreck?

I was sweeping my tiny kitchen in the moments before supper, my dog at my feet and a thousand small graces leaping toward me at once. I had arrived from work just hours before. Four and some years I’ve come home from this place. My eyes met my husband doing chores in the room over, a man that I’ve loved for five. My phone lit up with a message from my best friend, and I wondered how long a stretch of those would measure. Miles of messages, twelve year’s worth. Tomorrow, Ryan and I would attend the same service at our same church. The one that held me and grew me and taught me to serve and welcomed me back, and on the eighteenth year is holding me still.

Here’s what I’m learning through a gracious unwinding:

As we are faithful, he is doubly so. He caught me in the middle of preparing a meal in my home that was to be enjoyed by a two-person family - a task so menial and regularly small - and laid before me a feast having to do with forty years of his faithfulness. I’m headed into my twenty-fourth year here, and in the corners where I’ve been faithful, he’s gone and doubled them. It’s kingdom math that I don’t understand nor do I feel right in accepting, but we’ve never had much choice in the matter. He gives to his children freely and lavishly and without reason.

Faithfulness is only faithfulness. A cynic searches the word and will not find in it some ulterior motive or unhappy connotation. It will always be properly construed. Faithfulness, in its simplest form, is the same and is the same. Steadfast. Pillars left standing above the wreck. Not overused or misused or taken out of context by the world. We either are or we aren’t, but you and I cannot be faithful too many or too little times. What good news for a post-Eden people failing to hit their quotas.

Being faithful does not allot us the time, thank goodness, to go around justifying a good or a bad week, scrutinizing the weeks and the lives handed to those near us. But it does generously give us each our mornings, our families, our health and our homes. Our small grievances, our losses, and our suffering should it come. Tending to these is our holiest work.

Richard Wilbur, in his poem, Love Call Us to the Things of This World, says this – “Let there be nothing on earth but laundry, nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam and clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

This has been my prayer ever since. The sanctity of Christ maturing me, making His likeness my own is no small thing; yet, we find him in the corner, in the collection of small things taking us there. Meetings and due dates, clean dishes and pruned fingers, ordinary and every single day. I said this last month, that it’s the driving of my feet to the ground and my hand to the plow that reminds me about the humble man who lived to sow seeds for no easy reason other than following in the way of his master. Clear dances done in the sight of heaven. Let there be nothing else on earth but this.