Sunday, December 29, 2024

Like a grindstone. . .

In the backroom of my father's hardware store, we had an electric grinder.  More often than not I watched as my dad took a perfectly good tool that was not working for what he wanted or needed and grind it into something he did need and would work.  It was a joke between my brother and I that more screwdrivers were sacrificed to the grinding wheel than would ever be known.  I wish I had that grinder.  I find myself constantly searching for tools that I do not have that could be made by destroying what I do have.

There was a time when I thought faith was like an "aha!" moment.  In the sudden clarity of the Spirit, all things really did make sense.  Long ago I was disabused of that fanciful notion.  Early on in my first parish I begged God to fix what I thought to be wrong there.  I prayed for calls that did not come.  In the end I found myself like one of dad's tools -- ground down by the Spirit.  Contrary to what you might think, this did not lead to despair.  It lead to purpose and from that purpose God worked to achieve results I did not think possible nor could have ever presumed.  The parish I wanted so desperately to leave became the home I wept for when the time and the call did come.  That first day there my wife and I drove through Main Street and she asked how long we would be there.  "Two years tops!" I said confidently.  Nearly thirteen years later, after losing a baby and having three more children, it was the hardest thing of all to leave.  The Holy Spirit had ground us down and shaped us back up in ways we did not even realize.

The work of the Spirit is not a light bulb going off in your head but the slow and painful grinding down of that which is not the Lord's in order that you might belong to Him.  Repentance and sanctification are not decisions made in a moment but the long term work of the Spirit grinding us down and grinding down from us that which is not His work.  That is why it is so hard for us to see the signs of any progress and so easy for us to note the signs of regress.  We want things to happen NOW but God brings all things into their own time at His own time.  That includes you and me.

Now lest some presume that this might also apply to changes in doctrine and teaching, this is not a parallel.  The Spirit is not slowly grinding down in us that which Scripture has said in favor of some new voice, new teaching, new Gospel.  Hogwash!  Balderdash!  Instead it is he opposite.  We are being grown down to fit what God has said and what will not change but endures forever so that we also might endure forever.  God does not have to change the shape of the family or the purpose of sex or create new genders or teach us to appreciate reproductive freedom because that is what we want.  Instead, our views and opinions meet the grindstone of the Spirit and we conform to His will and purpose.  Even if we never understand it or if we think we have it down pat, the purpose is not for us to get Him but for us to know what He has done to get us.  

Let me give you a clue.  In my heart I prayed for God's forgiveness for leaving the first call and coming here to Tennessee.  For a couple of years I thought it was the wrong decision and prayed God to make it right or make me right for it.  Then at some point, the understanding slipped into the background and the Spirit opened my eyes to what needed to be done then and I was as free as I had been in New York -- free from my contrived notions of what should be and of my dogged pursuit for me to understand God and for Him to understand me.  And now I woke up here 32 years later at the end of my active service.  I do not know where the time went but I know this -- the Spirit kept hidden from me His wisdom so that I might know Him and His purpose by faith.  That was enough.  It always is.

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