Wendell
Berry is one of my favorite authors and poets. His poem “The Real Work” struck
me recently as particularly wise for our time. It reads in its entirety:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
At
various times in my life in general and during the past several weeks in
particular, I have been unsure of what to do and which way to go. What is safe?
What is necessary? What is the wisest course of action? How should we live? How
can we connect and invest in relationships? How can we care for each other? And
how can we possibly get up and face another day?
In
some ways, perhaps Berry is right. Maybe being forced out of autopilot is
actually good for us. We have spent so much time and energy making our lives as
efficient and entertaining as humanly possible, and stuffed full of all the
things we frantically love and desire. And if we were sometimes overwhelmed or
exhausted, if we sometimes missed out on events because our schedule was too
full, if we sometimes were too tired to spend time with loved ones, we felt it
was ultimately worth the cost. Another of my favorite authors, Laurie Colwin,
once said, “The fact is that modern life has deprived us of
life's one great luxury: time.”
Now
that so many of those things that used to occupy and define us are no longer
options, we have to spread out our hands and see what it is that we have left.
We have to take stock of our lives just as much as we do of our pantries and
our bank accounts. We may have our free time back, but what else do we have? As
Francis Chan says in Crazy Love, “We
are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which
spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. … We are
slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.” He is of course
drawing a direct contrast to the instructions for life given to us in James
1:19: “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be
quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry…” James gets this way
of living on good authority; we read in Psalm 103:8 that “[t]he
LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.” And
that’s one thing that we do still have: the assurance that despite the
circumstances around us, God is still good. He is still in control. He loves
us. And at the end of this story, love wins. We can trust in that even when we
have nothing else.
In John chapter 20, we read how early on Sunday morning, while
it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to visit Jesus’ tomb. Perhaps you spent
some time over the past week reflecting on what Jesus’ death would have meant
for his followers and friends. They were grief-stricken, of course, and utterly
heart broken. They also feared for their own lives. They were scared and
uncertain, and afraid to leave the room where they had gathered; they were
sheltering in place. They no longer knew what to do, and they no longer knew
which way to go. But Mary was willing to walk out in faith into the darkness.
Because of her willingness to follow Jesus into the uncertain dark, she was the
first to see him again, the first to hear him speak her name, the first to step
blinking into a new, post-resurrection life.
As Paul says, “What, then, shall we say in response
to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare
his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him,
graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God
has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one.
Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right
hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love
of Christ?” (Romans 8:31-35a).
Change
can be hard. Especially change that we didn’t choose, but was forced upon us.
Staying home and protecting the vulnerable in our communities is the right
thing to do, but that doesn’t always make it an easy thing to do. And when we
are in darkness, or people we love are struggling in darkness, there is no easy
lightswitch of life for us to flip on for them. All we can do for them is what
Jesus does for us: we can enter into the darkness with them and walk alongside
them. Let’s drive back the darkness across our city, with our singing, our zoom
meetings, our prayers, our love for each other. And just think, without the
darkness, we never would have known how brightly we can truly shine.
So then, this is the real work, for which we have been equipped by the finished work of Christ. This is the journey. Let’s get down to work, brothers and sisters.
Written By: Jess Upshaw Glass