Something God Alone Can See

Many writers, artists, and other creatives attempt to encapsulate their coming year into a single word. This word—such as love, abundance, service, or spirit— serves as a touchstone, a means of testing the quality of a particular activity or attitude throughout the year, and as a remembrance of that year in its passing. For many of us, whatever our individual and unique words were in January, they are now collective and unified: the word for 2020 is GRIEF.

Grief is a snake of sorts, living mostly hidden underneath the brush of life, but surprisingly popping up its head at unexpected times and places. Once the initial stunning shock has passed, we become statuaries and instead stare and slowly feel the weight of its presence like pouring watery sand into our bodies through our heads. We focus on the head of the vermin as the static of the rest of the world falls away. What shall we do? Kill the thing? Run? Beg it for mercy? Try to stroke its neck? Pretend it doesn’t exist?

This is the global experience in 2020 with the pandemic. Regardless of an individual’s point of view, a snake is a snake is a snake. Grief upon grief, and it is beyond even the ability of angels to lay judgement upon whose grief is worse than another’s (who but God can count and keep teardrops?). Whether shouting or shrinking, every human has been affected by its crushing grasp.

In John chapter 6, Jesus prepares his disciples for inevitable grievous consequences of following Him. As he educated them with the reality of excruciating disappointment and future martyrdom, He tested them, asking in light of these things, if they would remain faithful regardless. He asked, in considering the abandonment of others who were tickled by His works and words, “Will ye also go away?” Peter’s answer embodies the Christian response to all of the horror and tragedy and sorrow and anguish of this life pregnant with the pangs of sin, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Some say that such faith in the midst of sorrow is akin to leaning upon a crutch with which to walk through life. To which I say, a hearty crutch with which to beat a snake is a powerful thing to have in hand, and I do not delude myself with power I do not possess when greeted with its fangs unarmed. However, trust in God’s sovereignty and knowledge of even a snake’s obedience to its Creator allows this sacred cane leaned upon, as Jacob, to become not only a help, but a hope. Someday, this very hour perhaps, every crutch will be beat into a plowshare and our harvests will be all goodness and righteousness and truth, the snake forever relieved of its head and home.

I also find much comfort in the fact that even through the choking smoke, I see bulbs all over the rhododendrons for “in the bulb there is a flower”. This line from “Hymn of Promise” has rung in my heart throughout much of this season. It was originally written for funerals. I dare say that the entire year has been one long plod of funeral after funeral: loved ones dying from disease, the scourge of loneliness and depression, economic catastrophe, family strife and severing, loss of goals and dreams and tickets to every relief of life’s burdens, governmental overreach seesawing with governmental impotency, centuries of rebellious thinking fruiting into riots and ruin, and a church that has leaned upon pragmatism and compromise and fear of ridicule or rebuke has found its salt tasteless and its light ridiculous to illuminate anything whatsoever, much less harbor a haven for wandering and confused sheep.

Natalie Sleeth wrote “Hymn of Promise” when she was pondering the “whole reawakening of the world that happens every spring”. This hymn encapsulates the hope we have in Christ, in His future and sure victory for anyone who has been broken not only by the world and its systems, but by his or her own poverty of piety. It points to the declarations of creation all around us, if we would but have eyes to see and ears to hear and fingers to touch, that God is still active and moving about His purposes, and not even the gates of hell can stop His church, much less hinder a butterfly coming forth or an apple forming. In the end is our beginning, Natalie writes quoting from T. S. Elliot, and in this ghastly year of endings and goodbyes, we especially keep our eyes upon Jesus.

He says, “Follow Me,” because He is the way. Let us run after Him who walks on water and binds up the brokenhearted with His own flesh and blood. Every sin will be cast from the earth and every tear dried forever. Let it be so, for our Lord comes, and unlike our weak words of whatever year it happens to be, His Word is sure and without end.