Dear one,
“Life ebbs and flows” was the thought I shared with you last week, a current which remains with me—if you’ll allow me to alter the metaphor. That is, even if I am granted the freedom to build up or to tear down, to gather stones or to scatter them, I am aware of my need to focus: amid the give-and-take, somewhere upon the horizon my vision must remain fixed—upon an island, a rock, or a person—or otherwise I am subject to wind and wave, tossed about, and if the ebb-and-flow has a strong undercurrent, then my efforts are fully awash.
This morning I read these words, which bear the light of Ecclesiastes 3:
“By honour and dishonour, by evil report and by good report, by plenty and by poverty, by joy and by distress, by persecution and by peace, by all these things is the life of your souls maintained, and by each of these are you helped on your way. Oh, think not, believer, that your sorrows are out of God’s plan; they are necessary parts of it” (Charles Spurgeon).
Of course Spurgeon’s words might appear archaic to our eye, and certainly I am not at the moment of the sorrow he addressed, and yet in them we hear the ebb-and-flow of life. However, if that back-and-forth tends more and more to difficulty and darkness, to clutter and even chaos, then we are prone to ask: Why? This question Spurgeon answered by writing: “These trials (these ebbs and flows?) … are winds which waft your ship the more swiftly towards the desired haven.” And what is that “haven,” if not the hope of those eighteenth and nineteenth century slaves who sang: “This world ain’t my home, I’ jus’ passin’ through, but Lord, if heaven ain’t my home, then what will I do?”
Not because of sorrow, and certainly not because I am enslaved, do I need to remain focused upon that heavenly haven; rather, because many are the opportunities which call upon my time, the more I need to say “no.” No, my focus is to remain upon pastors with few resources and the writing and editing their needs engender. Daily and weekly I know life’s ebbs and flows, but amid these the vision of needy pastors must remain—only overshadowed by the light of the One who stands upon the shore and asks: “Children, have you caught any fish?” (John 21:5).
Focusing,
Stan