Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Kentucky love affair

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

From Isaiah 40
Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Her service is at an end. Her guilt is covered. Yes, from the hand of the Lord she has received double for all her sins.

There are many ways to say, "I've got your back." Probably the best of them are wordless, anchored by touch and service. I hold your hand, rub your feet, make you coffee in the morning, and you know I am not going anywhere. I am on your team.

God's always got my back. This is more clear to me as I get older. He speaks tenderly and gently to me: "Your service is at an end. Your guilt is covered." Perhaps I am not quite ready to hear these words, but I know they are there for me.

I think about Hannah Coulter's words in Wendell Berry's novel: "The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's."

Hannah's husband Nathan is sick. He refuses treatment. And Hannah is beside herself.

I was beating the hell out of a dozen egg whites in a bowl. My tears were falling into the bowl and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frothy mess into the sink. I said, "Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?"

"Dear Hannah, I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself." He came to me then. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate. (p. 158-161)

Hannah went back with her daughters to the doctor. "Nathan doesn't want to die of a cure," she told him. And then the two of them, they lived right on. "Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came."

There is never a reason to shut off the singing. Sleigh bells ring. Am I listening? No appropriate description of life excludes the fact of death, and so we live right on. Grass withers, flowers wilt, the word of our Lord stands forever.

Hannah finishes the story of her life standing at the gate. Nathan "looks at me with a look I know. The shiver of the altogether given passes over me from head to foot."

Remember us, Lord, when we fly from the flock and are lost at night. Do not let us go. Come after us, and bring us back. Your comfort makes me far more free than anything I can ever do alone. "Just stay," you say. "Just be." I will. This is all I need.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 2004, chapters 20 and 24

Devotions Archive

Kentucky love affair

Tuesday, December 11, 2018