The Sauntering Pilgrim

What do you do when you’re unable to make sense of life – when its pieces lie before you like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no box-top picture to help you assemble them? Are there pieces, you may wonder, that were never meant to be part of the picture you’re working on? Is there a piece missing that, when you find it and put it into place, will make the whole picture snap into focus?

Two Sundays ago, Pastor Neil said we Christians sometimes need to do things we don’t want to do, things distasteful or objectionable, things we may believe are too difficult for us, like forgiving, with painful humility, those who have deeply wounded us. Or we might need to be a reconciler when what we really want to be is a victor. Sooner or later, the way to fullness of faith will require us to do things we believed had no place in our well-ordered picture of life.

There are parts of life – experiences and realities too hard to comprehend – that don’t fit our imagined picture of how life ought to be. Take Arlen Jenkins, for example, the six-year-old over at Good Shepherd, whose family is raising money so she can have a bone-marrow transplant to fix a rare genetic disease she has struggled with all her life. How does that fit into the picture of her life or that of her family?

Surely, we believe, some pieces of life were not meant to be part of our picture, so we assess blame. Remember when Jesus saw a man who had been blind from birth, and the disciples believed he was blind because he or his family had sinned? Jesus said the man’s blindness was not because someone sinned; rather, it had something to do with revealing the power of God (John 9:1-3).

Jesus invites us to step back and wait until we see the bigger picture. There are pieces of this puzzling life we can’t begin to comprehend with our limited perspective. So he told a parable about weeds growing in a field of wheat (Matt. 13:24-30). How did the weeds get there, the servants wanted to know? An enemy must have sown them, they reasoned. Shall we pull them out, they wondered? It was something any rational farmer would have done.

But no, the farmer said; at first it’s hard to tell weeds from wheat, and their roots are so intertwined, you can’t uproot the weeds without damaging the wheat. You may believe you’re clearing out the bad, but you may be damaging the good more than you realize. Don’t act before the time is right, and leave the sorting out to God.

After working on the puzzle of my life all these years, I still wonder how all these pieces can be part of the picture. I’d like to get rid of some of the pieces I’ve lived: poor choices, blessings ignored, offenses endured, opportunities squandered, the hurt I’ve caused others, the damage I’ve done. But wait, a voice whispers; leave the judgment to God; have patience to see how things turn out.

Erik Kolbell recalled when his fourteen-year-old daughter Kate got her first job. She had been excited about assuming some of the responsibilities of adulthood. But two weeks later, everything came to screeching halt when Kate was hit by a car. Erik knew only three things: Kate was alive, her injury was serious, and she was being attended by a neurosurgeon, which meant she had a brain injury.

Kate had to undergo immediate brain surgery, a kind never before performed on someone so young, and later that night, surgery again. Eventually she was transferred to another hospital for intensive therapy. Because of the accident, she could no longer speak or do math, her depth perception was impaired, and she had lost nearly all of her memories. She continued therapy for months and later had a third brain surgery. Erik finally believed she was going to make it.

Still, he continued searching for the meaning in what had happened. Just before Kate’s third surgery, Erik described not knowing how much of her he was going to get back. “Where’s the good?” he wondered. He found it when Kate came out of surgery, still woozy from the anesthesia, as a series of visitors began arriving at her bedside.

They all began the same way: “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me,” they would say before identifying themselves: I’m the attending physician who admitted you; I was the chaplain on duty when you came in; I was the social worker who oversaw your care; I was the duty nurse after your surgery. And there were others, a parade of smiling, supportive faces that made Eric suspicious. So he pulled one aside and asked, “There’s something more going on here, isn’t there?” “Yes, there is,” the nurse replied.

“For every ten kids we see with this injury,” the nurse said, “nine of them die. There is only one Kate. We need to come back and we need to see her because she is what keeps us coming back to work in this place every day.” Then Erik realized, “This is the redemption. This is the good” (Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness).

Not for a moment do I believe God had a reason for causing Kate’s accident – not because she or her parents had sinned, nor because an enemy caused it, nor for any other reason. To say God has a reason for making bad things happen to good people says more about us than about God. Bad things happen in life; weeds grow among the wheat. Nevertheless, redemption can follow, and good can come in its time.

Describing poetry grounded in the hard geography of New England, one writer said, “the narrators in many New England-situated poems find themselves surrounded by a dark world, one set in startling juxtaposition to the ‘clearing’ a poem makes. That circle of light assumes its definition in a complicated dance with the dark. . . . [T]he act of creating a poem makes a clearing in the dark“ (Jeanne Braham, The Light within the Light).

I no longer expect an answer to my “why?” questions. But I’ve learned my hunger for meaning and my search to find it can begin to create “a clearing in the dark” where a light may assume its definition in a complicated dance with the dark. We have to keep choosing and creating the story of our life from among all the possibilities that lie before us, from among all the weeds and wheat scattered throughout our days.

It turns out the piece we thought was missing from the puzzle of our life is not really missing. It’s hidden among all the others, the weeds and wheat, the grit and grandeur of daily life. Don’t uproot and throw away any of it before its time. “Adopt the pace of nature,” Emerson advised: “her secret is patience.” ▪