Dear Ray,
There is something I have been trying to find words for. It has to do with the distance between what we have come to love in the Lord and what we may ever see expressed during our lives.
We have spoken so much about Christ as our life. About Zoe. About the possibility of people living together out of Him, with room for each member, without someone drawing everyone to himself. These things are precious to me. Yet sometimes the very preciousness of them becomes a weight. Because we see something, we begin to feel that we must somehow bring it into being. We must find the people, find the way, remove the obstacles, and produce the reality before our time runs out.
I am beginning to question whether that responsibility was ever given to us.
I have been thinking about the generations in Egypt. We read a few chapters and move from Joseph to Moses. But within that passage of Scripture, whole lives were lived. Children were born, grew into men and women, worked, raised their own children, became old, and died. For many, the bondage into which they were born was still there when they were buried.
They never saw Moses stand before Pharaoh. They never ate the Passover meal. They never stood at the edge of the sea and watched a way open.
Their children, or their children’s children, would see those things.
We are not told what each of those people understood. I would not want to invent a spiritual experience for them. But they belonged to the people to whom God had made His promise. Their lives took place within that promise, even while their circumstances gave them so little evidence of its fulfillment.
I find that sobering, Ray. I cannot hurry past those people anymore. From where we stand, we know that the deliverance came. From where they stood, there was another day of labor, another loss, another year.
I do not know how that felt to the ones who still hoped. I imagine there were days when the old promise seemed very far away.
Then I think of Abraham. He had heard from God. He had left his country. He had received a promise concerning a land and a people. Yet when Sarah died, he had to purchase a place to bury her in the land that had been promised.
There is something so tender and painful in that picture. He possessed a promise, and he needed a grave.
He did see Isaac. There were things God allowed him to hold in his arms. But the reach of what God had spoken extended far beyond his remaining years. Abraham would die. Isaac would die. Jacob would die. The promise would still be unfolding.
Their lives were not long enough to contain it.
Joseph seemed to understand this very clearly at the end. He knew he was dying. He also knew that God would bring His people out of Egypt. So he spoke about his bones.
When that day came, they were to take him with them.
He had been used to preserve the family, but he was not the man who would lead them out. He could entrust himself to a future that would arrive after his death. His last confidence reached beyond what he could accomplish or witness.
I am moved by that. He could die in Egypt without accepting Egypt as the final answer.
David brings this even closer to what I am trying to say. He had it in his heart to build a house for the Lord. And the Lord acknowledged the goodness of that desire. It was good that it was in his heart.
Yet David would not build it.
I have probably read that too quickly over the years. God could approve what David carried within him and still give its accomplishment to someone else. The desire was real. The affection was received. But the building was not his assignment.
David made preparations. He gave what he had. There was a part for him. Yet he would never walk into the finished house.
I wonder how often we have assumed that an inward burden must be a command to produce its fulfillment. We see something missing and immediately begin to feel responsible for supplying the whole of it. We cannot find the church life we long for, so we begin to think that we must somehow establish it.
Perhaps there are times when the Lord gives a person a definite work. But David makes me hesitate before assuming that everything we rightly desire is ours to bring about.
It may be good that it is in our hearts.
That may remain true even if we never see it standing before us.
Moses is a more difficult example, because Scripture connects his exclusion from the land with his disobedience. I would not want to soften that or make every unfinished life mean the same thing. Still, there he stands, looking toward a land he will not enter. After all those years, the people will continue without him.
The work of God has reached beyond the lifetime of His servant.
And then there is Daniel. He is shown things reaching far beyond his own day. He asks about their outcome. There are things he does not understand. At the end, he is told to go his way and rest, with his inheritance still awaiting him.
There is such mercy in that ending.
He does not have to understand everything before he rests. He does not have to remain alive until the whole matter is fulfilled. What God has shown him will not be lost because Daniel’s earthly life comes to an end.
Ray, I am growing older, and these accounts have a weight they did not have when I was young. There was a time when almost everything seemed to lie somewhere ahead of us. There would be time to understand, time to find the reality, time to see what we had heard so much about.
Now I cannot take that time for granted.
I still long to see people living out of Christ. I still believe His life can be the actual source of our life together. I long for the quiet freedom of members who belong to Him and can supply one another without being gathered around the strength of one personality. I long for something in which the weakest person has room to breathe.
But I do not know how much of that I will see.
And I do not think it would be honest to comfort myself by insisting that I certainly will see it, if only I believe enough or do the right things.
The Scriptures do not give every servant that ending.
This does not make the longing less precious. It does make me want to hold it with more humility. I may see some things truly and misunderstand others. My disappointment cannot become the measure of everyone else. Nor can I require you, or anyone, to carry the weight of fulfilling what is in my heart.
I do not want our friendship to become another place where either of us feels he must produce something for God.
We can care about these things together. We can speak honestly about what we have known and what we still do not understand. There may be something to give, something to write, someone to receive, some small response that is ours today. I would be grateful for that.
But the culmination belongs to God.
I am not saying this without sadness. There are things I deeply wish to see. I would love to know that some of what we have carried could find an expression beyond words. I would love to sit among people and recognize, quietly, that the life we have spoken of is finding its way among us.
Perhaps we will be given something of that. I hope so.
But if our lives end while much remains unfinished, I want to leave room for the possibility that we have still belonged to Him within His purpose. That we were loved there. That what was truly of Him in our hearts was received, even though our hands could not bring it to completion.
David was allowed to love the house he would never build.
Joseph was allowed to trust in the departure he would never lead.
Daniel was allowed to rest before the end of what he had been shown.
Perhaps we, too, may carry something precious without carrying the responsibility for its final expression.
I find myself returning to that word concerning David: it was good that it was in his heart.
I would be grateful, Ray, if the Lord could say that of us.
With love,
Brent
