In Everything

“Give them wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life, that each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.”

-The Book of Common Prayer

I had awakened, at last having slept. But my dreams had filled me with exhaustion. In one scene, I was climbing a wall and, with great effort, to shimmy myself up onto a ledge; the folks who followed me carried out this feat effortlessly. In another scene, there were four masked people heroically skydiving from an airplane. Everywhere around me were meadows of rubber tires, but there were flowers and an ethereal fog and trees, as well, throughout the landscape—hued colors of hope and wellness. This emotional schlep was no surprise to me, after a weekend of accompanying my parents on their house-hunting journey. I felt like I was looking through mullioned windows, a fragile stained-glass mural that held a scene, but we were not yet past the process to see how beautiful story unfolded.

It is like the poem of the weaver by Grant Colfax Tullar (1869-1950), which highlights the theme of divine design even when we cannot see how even the loose threads can possibly make sense.

“My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colours
He weaveth steadily.

Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper,
And I the underside.

Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why. 

The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.

He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.”

-Grant Colfax Tullar

In the lives of my parents, they had farmed their 300-acre land with tenacity and diligence, sowing seeds of faithfulness, “ordering their common life.” Where decisions about their next season in life wouldn’t nor couldn’t come lightly or quickly, it felt like we were ripping out the threads of their design as farmers by moving them. As we considered houses that were on the market and came to conclusions about what would be best for them, we were optimistic by the prospects; however, as one offer after another fell through and we faced the closed doors of real estate one after the other, I realized I was not trusting God with their lives. I had let fear take root. What Alisa Keeton wrote in The Body Revolution helped me realize how to make the shift from fear to faith:

“God means it when He says we are not to fear (be anxious, worried, or stressed). It’s not that fear is impolite and unbecoming of His children; rather, I believe He tells us not to fear because living stressed, anxious, afraid, or worried rips at the very thread of our design. Ongoing stress destroys our health, overwhelms our nervous system, disrupts the body-brain connection, and makes it hard for God’s perfect peace and presence to remain within us. The first step to healing is to stop living in fear and stress…We can learn to feel pain without letting it overtake us. We take heart (John 16:33) when remember who we are [and] who we belong to” (p.59).

-Alisa Keeton

Operating in anxiety and feeding that anxiety with negative emotions “rips at the very thread of our design.” Just as the song above reminds us, “Everything changes, but not Your faithfulness; No matter what I’m in, God, You’re in everything.” In perplexity, in sorrow, in joy.

The fact remains that I am scared. Certain things in life, when confronted with them, scare me. Like facing my parents’ mortality. It’s like a premature grieving; after all, it is in part what necessitates their move. And yet repeatedly, we are admonished to “fear not, neither be faint-hearted” (Isaiah 7:4). In his foreward to When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese inverts this admonition in prose-like fashion:

“Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like.”

-Kalanithi, p.xix

In faith, with courage, we can be ready for the next thing; we fix our eyes on him for his timing in our lives, and even if we don’t yet know where our journey takes us, we know who we take our marching orders from. The Psalmist gives us a visual representation of this in Psalm 84:1, where the Valley of Baca stands for a challenging season. The admonition here for us is that God can make difficult seasons a source of blessing and refreshment. We have but to remember that when a seed is planted, it doesn’t bear fruit the next day. So, in our lives, we too must bear in mind that patience will have its reward. Continue walking the path, continue rooting out unhealthy thought patterns while staying rooted in the Father, and see His pattern emerge in our common life.

“How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty!

…Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself…
blessed are those who dwell in your house…
Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.
as they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs…
They go from strength to strength.”

-Psalm 84:1, 3-7

“Do not be anxious about your life,
what you will eat or what you will drink,
nor about your body,
what you will put on.”

-Matthew 6:25

“In everything
by prayer and supplication
with thanksgiving
Let your requests be made known to God.”

-Philippians 4:6 ASV