Three
riders rode silently through the silent, black night, even their eyes darkened
except in the passing illuminations when the clouds exposed the
moon. When they heard the crunch of gravel beneath the horses’
hooves, they smiled to themselves, knowing that at last they had reached the
dry riverbed which marked the last leg of their journey.
Suddenly
the horses started and reared, spooked by some invisible
danger. Before the riders could quiet them again, a Voice sliced
through the darkness: “Halt, riders. Gather stones from
this riverbed, and I assure you, when morning breaks you will be both sad and
glad.”
Stunned
into silence, after a moment the riders shrugged and broke into nervous
laughter. “We’ve nothing to lose,” said their leader. As
one man in the pale moonlight, they stooped, and each chose a handful of stones
to toss into a pocket. Their horses calmed, they remounted and rode
on until morning.
When
they stopped to water their horses and swallow their meager breakfast, one of
them remembered the stones. He emptied his pocket and gasped in
amazement. Seeing him, the other two followed suit and stared in
wonder. The handfuls of river rocks they had gathered in the night
had been transformed into rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and pearls.
As
the Voice had foretold, as morning broke they were both sad and
glad: glad they had obeyed the strange command, but weeping with
sorrow that they had not filled pockets and saddlebags to overflowing with all
they could carry.*
*************
The
unexceptional pebbles of our daily existence are the raw material
The
consecrated heart discovers this transforming grace of God in every place and
activity He assigns. The commonest thing – from data entry to dishes
to preparing lesson plans to changing diapers – takes on the very glory of
heaven when done as unto the Lord.
Some reading
this may protest, “But I have POTS (or fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Long COVID,
autoimmune disease, MS) and all I can do is lie on the couch. I can’t even read
or watch screens much right now. How am I supposed to work as unto the Lord? I
can’t work at all.”
I have been
there too. I am so thankful you are here. I recorded a reading of this post
largely for you. From my experience of life and Scripture, I can say this: if
my portion for the day is to rest a sick body, do physical therapy, swallow
pills, and navigate all that is involved in accessing medical care, even that
can be offered to the Lord as worship. If all I can do is receive care
from others, alone in a dark room and largely deprived of sensory stimuli, I
can offer my suffering to the Lord and trust Him to receive it. I can pray when
able and offer my silence and listening to Him when unable. I can seek from the
Lord a cheerful and grateful heart toward my helpers. I can lean all my weight on the everlasting arms of God and glorify Him by resting in His grace.
No matter the
life circumstance, even in prison if it comes to that: as I keep the windows of
my soul open toward
What
is this sacramental life? For one thing, it is more easily described
than defined. As a child, I had an African violet in my bedroom
window. I never lost my amazement that, no matter how I turned it in
the morning, by the time I came home from school it had tilted itself toward
the sunlight coming through the window. When we returned to the
United States from the mission field, I would laugh at my nine year-old dog
Steinway. After 3 years of separation under my parents’ care, he
didn’t want to lose me again, I suppose, so he followed me around the house all
day long. Even when we were in the same room and I was in plain
view, he followed me with his eyes. The Ebony Dog who succeeded him
would do the same thing. His whole being was oriented toward me. The
sacramental life is like that: practicing the discipline of fixing
my eyes on Jesus, no matter what, until it becomes habit; continually adjusting
my attitude and actions in the changing circumstances of life so that the
direction of my gaze remains constant in the midst of it all.
*************
Granted,
this truth is easier to write than to live. The world, both without
and within the church, opposes it, the flesh shuns it, and the devil thwarts
it. Contemporary Christless society believes work is what we do to
earn money in order to be able to spend the rest of our time doing as we
please. On the contrary, the Scriptures teach that it is in our work
as well as our rest that we fulfill God’s design for us. Adam was
given the task of cultivating the garden in the day of his creation, not as punishment
for eating the forbidden fruit. It is only the toilsome frustration
of work now which results from sin. Even in the church, we tend to
glorify “full-time Christian service” (which being interpreted is paid
employment in gospel ministry) as somehow more holy than other vocations, but
the Scriptures teach that we are to do all things to the glory
of God (Col 3:17). Was Jesus less holy and obedient to His Father in
His first thirty years of submission to His parents, learning Joseph’s
carpentry trade, and supporting his widowed mother and siblings as was His
responsibility as the oldest son, than he was in His three years of public
ministry? Was the apostle Paul following Christ at a distance during
the days he spent making tents so that he would not place a burden on the
churches to support him? Yet in our elevation of professional
Christian ministry (especially missions) above all other careers, is this not
what we imply?
Our
own flesh, the self-life, plays right into this idea. After all,
it’s far more glamorous to write a book for the Christian bestseller list than
to write a letter to a shut-in cut off from other Christian fellowship, or a
note to tuck in a child’s lunchbox. It’s much more gratifying to the
ego to cook a meal for a roomful of grateful, hungry people at the local
homeless shelter than for a kitchen of grumbling teenagers who seem only to
complain. It may be more motivating to build a house for Habitat for
Humanity than to keep up with the home repairs on a honey-do list. It’s
often easier to travel half a world away to preach Christ to those you will
never see again than it is faithfully to live out the gospel and speak when God
opens doors among your usual acquaintances, who may make life uncomfortable for
you if they don’t agree.
The rewards for public ministry are also public; we have our
compensation in the applause of the watching crowd. The rewards for
a life lived in quiet obedience carried out before the face of God are
primarily between the soul and her Lord, although such a life cannot help but
bear fruit in the character and outward life as well, as we become what we
behold (2 Cor. 3:18). Does that make them less
precious? Hardly. What can be sweeter than going about my
day in the constant companionship of my Best-Beloved? Jesus promised
exactly that treasure to those who abide in Him by keeping His
commandments: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My
Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him. . .
. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in
My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love;
just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His
love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be made full” (John 14:23; 15:9-11, NASB1995).
Finally,
the devil is all too happy to support this notion of work as something that
keeps us from doing “real ministry” and drains the joy from life. If
believed, this idea may produce a sloppily done or entirely neglected duty, all
for the sake of “ministry.” On the other hand, as Lazarus’ sister
Martha illustrates, we may be easily distracted by work as an end in itself so
that we miss God’s still, small voice speaking to us through it. The
thorns which choked the growth of the seed in the parable of the soils, after
all, are the cares and worries of the world. Either error,
forsaking duty for ministry or losing sight of God in the busyness of work,
comes from the enemy and distorts the truth.
*************
“But
how can I expect to hear a still, small voice in a carpool of noisy
pre-schoolers shouting?” or perhaps “. . . when the only beauty in my work is
the fake ivy peeking over from the next cubicle?” I never said it
was easy, but I assure you: insofar as you gather the pebbles of the ordinary
and offer them to God, you will be both sad and glad. More
importantly than my lone opinion, the testimony of the Christians of the past
assures you of the same truth.
Brother
Lawrence wrote of it as the “practice of the presence of God” in his book by
that name. Though a monk, his duties differed little from those of
the average housewife (excepting the carpool of screaming kids). He
learned the art of constant conversation with God even as he scrubbed pots and
worked in the garden, and it transformed his attitude and
relationships. This can begin simply, with a hymnal over the sink, a
recording of sacred music or Scripture playing in the car, prayer reminders
where one will see them often, or Scripture memory cards next to the computer
for those inevitable delays while the program opens or document
saves. Whatever reminds us to look back to Jesus when we lose our
focus will help us on this journey.
Martin
Luther wrote, “The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they
be, do not differ in one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic
laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all
the works are measured before God by faith alone. . . . Indeed, the
menial housework of a manservant or maidservant is often more acceptable to God
than all the fastings and other works of a monk or priest, because the monk or
priest lacks faith” (quoted in Os Guinness, The Call, 34).
Elisabeth
Leseur, a housewife in upper-class French society in the late nineteenth
century, began to follow Christ as the rather unexpected consequence of her
husband’s attempts to persuade her to abandon the trappings of her childhood
religion and join him in militant atheism. When the Lord opened her
eyes to the folly of the arguments before her, He drew her into a personal
relationship with Himself for the first time, as her previous religion had been
merely formal with no sincerity. How did she respond to this turn of
events? She began her own self-study program of the New Testament
and the lives of Christians from history and sought to live out the life and
love of Christ with her husband and the friends her social station required her
to entertain. She lived out 1 Peter 3, despite continual ridicule
from family and friends and increasingly poor health, which prevented her from
leaving her home at all in the last years of her life. She sought to
conduct her life in keeping with resolutions such as the following:
To go more and more to souls, approaching them with respect and
delicacy, touching them with love. To try always to understand
everything and everyone. Not to argue; to work instead through
contact and example; dissipate prejudice, to reveal God and make Him felt
without speaking of him; to strengthen one’s intelligence, to enlarge one’s
soul. . . ; to love without tiring, in spite of disappointment and
indifference. . . . To learn from the Heart of Jesus the secret of
love for souls and deep knowledge of them: how to touch their hurts
without making them smart and to dress their wounds without reopening them; . .
. to disclose Truth in its entirety and yet make it known according to the
degree of light that each soul can bear (Robin Maas, “A Marriage Saved in Heaven: Elisabeth
Leseur’s Life of Love,” https://catholicladylive.blogspot.com/2011/02/marriage-saved-in-heaven.html).
Her life motto became, “Every soul that uplifts itself uplifts the
world.” After her death, the crowds of people touched by her
charitable works and correspondence, reading her journal, and her life itself
became the means of her husband’s conversion. He later entered
vocational Christian ministry and labored to keep her memory alive and honored.
The
more well-known Christian teacher Oswald Chambers writes frequently of the
“drudgery of discipleship” in his devotional classic My Utmost for His
Highest. For example, in the September 11 entry, he notes, “The
things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this
is an indication that it takes all God’s power in me to do the most commonplace
things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels
and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal
more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God
Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be
done.” Again, in the October 21 entry, he writes, “We do not need
the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can
face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of
God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery
as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple
of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things
for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary
things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned
in five minutes.” No, nor in five lifetimes, it sometime seems.
Finally,
*************
The
invisible in the visible, the pearl latent in the grain of sand, the diamond in
the lump of coal, God’s grace conveyed to the human heart in the ordinary
duties at hand in each day. . . Anything done for the glory of God, in
dependence on His Spirit, in obedience to the commands of Christ, may be lifted
to our Lord as a sacrifice of praise. To quote Lilias Trotter, "Meeting
His wishes is all that matters."
May He strengthen us to learn the discipline of
offering each moment and task in faith to Him, to be transformed by His glory
into the means for His grace to take fuller possession of our hearts through
the sacrament of the ordinary.
* My version of a story John Baldwin told my church youth group
in the summer of 1990 (although some details have no doubt altered in my
memory); I have found the story used as illustration various places but not
succeeded in tracing the source. If you know, please let me know so I can
attribute it correctly.
