Hold the Fort

My sweet wife just asked me why she has to have a child who needs so much help on school work. I didn’t answer. I know her heart.

She wasn't faulting our kid or lamenting having a child with a learning need. Neither of us would trade Caleb for some genetically altered picture of human perfection. She was asking a question with deeper roots: Why is life so full of toil and vexation? Oh, she knows the answer. We both know the theology of the Fall of Man. What we struggle with is the accumulated weight of that Fall, the weight that bears down on us from every angle all the time with never a reprieve. Or so it seems. Heather speaks as a battle scarred mother who has lost a son to cancer after a long, loosing fight. I heard her words not as a complaint but as a plea, a plea for the rest promised in Christ.

Living makes us weary, and for the life of me I cannot see how anyone can look at this world and not see the weight looming over all creation slowly grinding all things down. What fool can look out their window at the world and glory in the progress of Man? Where is the upward climb from the primordial sludge? I look out and see a rapidly accelerating slide back to that sludge. Since we will not return to our real origins as image bearers of the Most High God, we return to the ones we fabricated. We reduce ourselves to single celled filth dwellers and wonder why we live in a world of filth.

But what to do for now, until Christ returns or calls us home? We do like Paul and pour ourselves out like drink offerings for those who need us and by so doing we pour ourselves out to Jesus. When Heather slaves with our son over the math that he just can’t seem to get, she does something eternal. She is pouring herself into another, someone weaker, someone who needs her just as much as she needs Christ. She wears herself out once again--- at a good thing --- and grows weary.

Scripture commands us not to be weary in well doing, but does it command us not to be weary of having to do well? It strikes me that on some level we should be weary of this sin cursed world and long for another. But like good soldiers, we are called to fight on, weary as we may be, knowing that where and while we fight the weight of this world is pressed back and hope springs anew. The rest of Jesus is coming. We just need to hold our forts.