For many years our church has prayed for a very sweet lady who has bravely faced one affliction after another: surgeries on both knees, twice, serious infections and pneumonia, and now kidney disease. Although not elderly, her hair is turning grey and she walks with a cane. Her life is pretty much locked into the four walls of her house.
Our prayers for her healing have not been answered. We never know if we are waiting for God or God is waiting for us. Should we be praying more earnestly and with greater faith? Or should we be simply resting in God’s grace and sovereign wisdom? Or both, at the same time? This world is broken—sometimes I am too.
But I know there is a balance, a paradox, and contrapuntal music of grace and works, resting and striving. In a poem from his collection entitled Leavings Wendell Berry captures the paradox in his description of an old man’s faith.
By grace we live. But he can go
no further. Having known the grace
that for so long has kept this world,
haggard as it is, as we have made it,
we cannot rest, we must be stirring
to keep that gift dwelling among us,
eternally alive in time. This
is the great work, no other, none harder,
none nearer rest or more beautiful.
We do not stir to get grace. We move to make room for the gift and to keep it alive in us. Like the character in this poem, I have lived long enough to understand that keeping grace alive in my life and heart is “the great work.” And as Berry says, no work has been harder and “none nearer rest”. Right now I am too much in the thick of it to know if it is beautiful.
