Monday Morning Haze

Sheets of rain are spreading themselves over the hill in front of me, obscuring the flaming trees of red and yellow. Grey over shadows us all. The boys are listening to The Two Towers, the little girls are fighting with each other, Elphine is in bed listening to Anne of Green Gables again and playing majong on her iPod. She had a fever last night, a fact I did not discover until she came home from youth group and tried to climb in my lap.

Relieved that Solemn Communion came and went. Went well, in fact. Many good discussions. A good day together on Saturday making bread for communion on Sunday, eating lunch together, laying out and reviewing the Synthesis of the Eucharist, running crazy all over the church. Grateful for this small handful of children who wanted to come and listen and attend.

So often, in all I do, all the various tasks, I am overwhelmed by the oppression of futility. Does any of it matter? Are the words I'm saying falling down into an abyss of nothing? Do the small wretchedly repetitive tasks of cooking, cleaning, spelling, writing, math, Sunday School, do they amount to anything? In the moment there is no reward, or barely any. If there is gratification or fruit, it is all delayed. Looking over the narrow confined landscape of my work and toil, I am nearly always discouraged and cast down.

But yesterday was a bright shaft of sunlight that broke through the cloud of discouragement. For one thing, I realized more completely that Elphine had volunteered to help with Solemn Communion because she loved it so much when she went through it. I, you will not be surprised to know, did not perceive this with her when she was actually in the class. She, like all the others, was rolling around the floor as inattentive as it was possible to be. And yet, two years later, she remembered it all and really really really really wanted to relive it. The whole thing. For another, at the end of a difficult hour in the atrium with Marigold and Elinor, in which I threatened three times to send them out and was on the edge of carrying through, Marigold splayed herself out on the floor and thanked God for sending the light and being the light. And then finally, and most of all, the sermon tied up a lot of ends and gave me a good and hopeful picture of what it is that we're all doing.

Each week Matt has been building the argument of Paul to the Corinthians, line by line, showing the work of God in the making and building of the church. This Sunday the work of those in the church, building on the foundation of the Apostles whose work was laying the foundation of Christ himself (go listen to the sermon because I just said that badly), was in view. Why do we work? How do we work? What is the purpose of the work? How do we know if we have succeeded? And, spoiler alert, it ends well for those who are in Christ Jesus. Its possible to go terribly wrong, of course, but the small unnoticed inconsequential tasks, if done in the way Jesus himself said to do them, and done in his own power and not the in the pride and vanity of the flesh, and done freely out of love, those are not lost to him. Your father, as Jesus I think must have said somewhere or other, sees what you do in secret. Just as all the evil vile small rebellions of the world, and each person individually, will be rightly and truly judged on the last day, all the injustices that seem to go unaccounted for, that they will in fact be called to account, so also the small meager weak work of the inconsequential Christian counts for a great deal in the economy of God.

It's the Accounting that is such a comfort to me as I muddle along. May God judge the wicked. May he have mercy on whom he will have mercy. May he see the work of the humble and the struggles of those who love him. May he return to settle it all to rights. I know and expect that a good amount of what I've done will go up in a blaze of fire, as worthless then as it was when I first thought of doing it. The spinning, the wasted time, the lost moments, gone up in black burning smoke. But it may be, through God's own mercy, that as the smoke clears and the rubble is swept away, one small ruby or diamond or fleck of gold will be seen lying on the immense foundation of God's own rock, of Jesus himself. Not more than one. No laurel crown. No trumpet of glory. But perhaps one speck of indestructible gold.