Narratives and Denouements - February 12

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 87, 90; PM Psalm 136; Gen. 29:1-20; Rom. 14:1-23; John 8:47-59

Today’s Reflection

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night. You sweep us away like a dream; we fade away suddenly like the grass. … The span of our life is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty; yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass away quickly and we are gone. Who regards the power of your wrath? who rightly fears your indignation? So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. Return, O Lord; how long will you tarry? be gracious to your servants. Satisfy us by your loving-kindness in the morning; so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life.  –Psalm 90: 4-5, 10-14

The more I read and reflect on Scripture over time, this truth becomes increasingly clear to me: that God’s sense of time and my human sense of time are incredibly different. (I almost wrote “at odds” but thought the better of it and went with “different.”) The God we believe created the universe and the earth and all that is in it, including us, is a God who is beyond time as far as we humans can comprehend it. We live in a world that pushes us to embrace only what we can see and experience in this moment. We humans are impatient creatures—we want it all, and we want it now. But the older I get, the more I appreciate the beauty to be found in the mystery of not knowing, the beauty to be found in trusting that, in time, more will be revealed.

In today’s reading from Genesis 29, Jacob travels to the land where his mother Rebekah’s people live. He encounters Rachel, the younger daughter of his uncle, Laban, as she was caring for the sheep of the field. Jacob and Rachel seem immediately drawn to one another, there amongst the sheep—Jacob kisses Rachel, and is so moved that he wept aloud. When they return to the family home, Laban welcomes Jacob with great joy and warmth. Jacob asks for permission to marry Rachel, even though her older sister Leah is not yet married—in those days, the older was to marry first, and then the younger. Knowing this custom, Jacob offers to labor for Laban for seven years to earn the right to marry his true love, Rachel: “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.” Perhaps Jacob was blessed to fall into more of God’s big picture sense of time, and so the seven years didn’t seem so long—and maybe this was also because he was living and working alongside Rachel, so he was not as disheartened by the long wait.

Of course, at the end of the seven years, Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah instead—but then they strike a deal that allows Jacob to marry Rachel as well (in return for seven more years of labor—but while already being married to both daughters). For Jacob and Rachel, they experienced an immediate sense of connection, love at first sight. But they had to commit to seven more years of working and waiting—and then only to have things end up not nearly the way either of them had hoped. While Leah is easily able to bear children with Jacob, Rachel struggles with years of infertility. And yet, Rachel holds onto her faith, she stays close to God and after what probably seemed like an eternity: “Then God remembered Rachel, and God heeded her and opened her womb. She conceived and bore a son, and said, ‘God has taken away my reproach’; and she named him Joseph, saying, ‘May the Lord add to me another son!’” (Genesis 30: 22-24).

In the world of narrative, a plot has a beginning, a middle (most always with some plot twists and turning points mixed in), leading to some sort of denouement (literary term for that point in the narrative at which “the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved”). Often, we may hope our lives will follow in this kind of linear trajectory. Speaking for myself, I like to know where things are headed: where are all these plot twists taking me? And yet, I love and believe in a God who transcends all this. I believe in a God who cares enough for me to not just drop me down into a simple life plot where if I just go through points A, B, and C, then some simple ending will be revealed.

But there’s something to be said for the beauty in what we don’t know, what has not yet been revealed—the faith we hold onto when we follow God’s guiding into more circuitous narratives whose denouements we are not yet meant to know. We can hold onto the truth that more will be revealed, at the proper time, and that as we move forward in faith, we do so knowing that God is with us and God saves us—always.

Becky+

Questions for Self-Reflection

How do you comprehend God’s sense of time alongside our human sense of time? Do you experience this difference as comforting or frustrating—or just accept it as what is?  Reflect on the times in which your timeline for realizing hopes and dreams was different than how things ended up playing out. What were your prayers with God like in this time of waiting and watching for things to come to fruition?

Daily Challenge

As you go about your weekend, keep coming back to this poem by Wendell Berry, allowing yourself to reflect on these lines alongside recalling moments from your own life’s narrative thus far.

I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.

—Wendell Berry