Sorting some books, I found a number of old notebooks in which I’ve recorded words of wisdom, song lyrics, and prayers or blessings, from an extraordinary range of sources. Some of these saying used to be posted on my notice board, above my desk at college.
I thought to share some of these as ‘gleanings’—they are in a sense left-overs, from my days of study, teaching, pastoring, and just living. Some of them too bring precious memories of where or when these words came to me. Others have guided me through tough times.
Sir Francis Drake (1540 – 1596) is known for his role in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. He had in fact undertaken several other major expeditions fighting the Spanish navy, somewhat less successfully. The following is part of a prayer attributed to him:
O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants
to endeavour any great matter,
grant us to know that it is not the beginning
but the continuing of the same unto the end,
until it is thoroughly finished,
which yieldeth the true glory…
I take it that Drake meant the true glory to God, not himself!
The language is very old, Elizabethan of course, but in essence this is saying that God calls us to finish what we set out to do, to follow through and in fact finish well (‘thoroughly’).
There are two key things here, I think.
For me this prayer is saying, ‘Hang in there’. I have often recalled a lovely elderly man who one day walked up to me after a church service, took my arm and simply said, ‘Keep going.’ He had been a school principal, and I am sure he knew how easily one might simply throw it all away—with the sense that no one else knows, or perhaps cares, about just many balls you have to keep in the air, and how difficult it is managing many levels of responsibilities—all the stuff that makes up our modern, busy lives.
At such moments it is vital to remember what you set out to do in the first place, why you are there, and then also to remember that rarely do we ever see all or perhaps even much of the outcome of our work. We are contributing to the ongoing flow of life, community, an enterprise in health care, education, commerce or industry, recreation or justice-making. Our part is to keep going, follow through, and do whatever we can to complete our part in it all.
The other significant thing here, for me, is the virtue of endurance. There is a scripture text that says that faith produces endurance (James 1. 3). I hold the two ideas together, in the notion of faithfulness. So rarely in our community at large, certainly in the churches, do we celebrate faithfulness to a task, the enduring and committed doing of what needs to be done. Success stories are the spin we hear.
But in reality, life is much more about what the poet Auden once called the ‘long littleness’ of life. Just hanging in there, doing the business. And it is this, doing what we can, keeping going, that is most laudable.
We need to learn to celebrate that, in each other, and ourselves.