Are We Done?

Noted Presbyterian preacher Earl F. Palmer often said, “You, and everyone else you meet, are mid-story.” By this he meant each of us, our spouses, our children, our colleagues, our friends and acquaintances, people who bolster us, people who annoy us, total strangers, and even our enemies.

As to the unfolding of our lives, God is at any moment still working in us, on us, and through us. Our story is not yet complete.

We can be relieved to hear this, as it allows for mistakes, course corrections, and new trajectories. It allows for doubts, fears, and feeling lost. It also allows for repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. God’s grace and sovereign interest are in the midst of it all.

In our church staff meeting this morning, one of our pastors shared something insightfully germane from Eugene Peterson’s Living the Message (August 27):

“God creates in ways past finding out, with energy and beauty exceeding anything we have eyes and ears for. Nothing that we encounter from birth to burial merely is. It is the marvelous result of God’s making. There is a verb behind every noun, the first verb in cosmos and scripture: create. God saves in ways past finding out, with a persistence and wisdom exceeding anything we can understand. No person we meet from the beginning we open our eyes in the morning until we shut them in sleep at night is finished.”

At the least this gives us pause toward patience both with others and ourselves and, deeper in, curiosity as to just what God is up to.

Michael Denham