All will be well...

One of the more humbling "attitude adjustments" we can assent to in Lent is God's question to Job in chapter 38: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

We are so often tempted to think that we have access to Divine Providence or at least that we should.  We long to provide answers to questions that cannot be answered (suffering) and to have some sense of mastery over our lives.  This phenomenon was not unique to Job's questioning.  Remember Elijah.  God told Elijah: get off your hind quarters and come out of hiding, do something in spite of your fear.

We are still called to speak with prophetic voices in this day and age.  It is just that a prophet's voice is almost never welcomed.  It turns our comfortable worlds upside down and conveys some indictment from God.  In so many ways, when we read of exile and despair in scripture, people have forgotten who they are and whose they are.  Forgetting leads to exile.

As Kathryn Greene-McCreight points out, we wander in exile from God and even from ourselves.  We forget to give thanks for God's blessings and graciousness because we prefer to see these things as though they were mere coincidences. Gifts call for thankfulness. Coincidences can be ignored.

Where in this season of Lent have we settled for coincidental thinking rather than that of gift? Where and when have we questioned God when we have not gotten our way, received the healing we had prayed and hoped for?  Gift, healing, or blessing is often not what we imagine it to be.  It is a surrender to God to whom we ask to order our steps that we might humble ourselves before His will.  Easy?  By no means.

Healing, release from exile, is seldom relief from the immediacy of pain or separateness.  As the English mystic, Julian of Norwich assures, "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well." This is no smoothing over of the rough patches of our lives. Here we are pointed to the reality that St. Paul's speaks of in 1 Corinthians:  death is the last enemy.  Death stings in the present.  But death will be swallowed up in victory at that last day.

In some sense we are called to surrender to this path, the path of the Cross and suffering, with a call for trust, hope, and endurance.  As much as we resist, it is there before us.  I knelt by the bedside of one suffering, perhaps dying last night.  Though he could not speak much, as though by sheer grace, as I prayed he started singing "It is well with my soul." May it be well with ours whatever may come.

A prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

We have heard of your wondrous power,

the ways in which you make newness,

the ways in which you defeat death,

the ways in which you give life.

We trust you in the night while we sleep;

we rise early in the morn to find you alert, active, engaged.

You dazzle us day and night.

Yet...we notice the place where

you are curbed,

you are fringed,

you are held.

Your newness we do not see...so we wait.

Keep us easy at night in our wait.

Keep us vigilant in day while we wait.

Keep our wait fixed on you,

you alone,

you and none other...and we will rejoice.

Amen.