Saturday, May 24, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Clod and cloud
During the night Paul had a vision. A Macedonian stood before him and implored him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” We sought passage to Macedonia at once.
After a week of dark skies, tornadoes, drenching rain and cold, with the whispered, tentative promise that the sun’ll come out tomorrow, it finally did! Our back yard glistens. Rays of sun shining through deep bushes and trees paint the grass every color of green, bright on the ground below the dark green leaves. It is fine.
A few years ago we re-stained our redwood shed and added a brick patio, which I see outside our office window. Loving John Deere the way I do, we also found two old aluminum lawn chairs and a strange metal cabinet and painted everything green and yellow. The grass, which will not be held back for long, pokes up between the bricks. Either I revise my definition of beauty or find a way to push the grass down for another year. What is best? What would Wendell Berry say about our personal ecology?
I’ve kept a Berry poem for a depressing day to share with you. Our sunny lawn uplifts me, but today’s news, like every day’s news these days does not, so I’ll share the poem. He wrote it on a Sunday morning walking in the woods, which he did on every Sabbath for awhile.
It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives
that drives us half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken,
our bodies existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
in our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief. – Wendell Berry
Paul, Barnabas, Judas, Silas and now their new companion-friend Timothy traveled together as the first Christian missionaries. Unlike Luke and Hans Solo with their hologram of Princess Leia crying out to them for help (“You’re our only hope!”), Paul was guided by visions and dreams sent by the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Spirit directed them forward, and sometimes he stopped them in their tracks.
They traveled through the Phrygian and Galatian territory because they had been prevented by the Holy Spirit from preaching the message in the province of Asia. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go on into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them, so they crossed through Mysia and came down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision.
Our former missionary friends Greg and Mindy talk about how their lives in Kenya were guided by dreams and visions, as well as barriers raised or removed. What seems miraculous or impossible here in the US became something our friends trusted more and more, as it became even at times an everyday occurrence.
As they traveled from city to city, day after day the churches grew stronger in faith and increased in number. Know that the Lord is God; he made us and we are his. We are the flock which he tends. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
In our forty-five years together, Margaret and I have talked over and over about our hopes and dreams. Now, as we get older, a day does not go by when we don’t think of our mortality and the uncertainty about our future. But for both of us, when we return to relationship with other people – our friends, clients, neighbors, helpers in stores and restaurants, our uneasiness about our own lives fades.
In our own way we too are missionaries, offering the love of God to those around us. Knowing this, we are free from fear, able to wait and see what happens next. We can know like Paul, that we are fighting “the good fight,” finishing the race, and keeping the faith, in the midst of all the clods and clouds.
(Acts 16, Psalm 100, Colossians 3, John 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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