For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.
1 Peter 2:15 (NIV)
The Reply That Takes Months
Garlic goes in the ground in October and comes up the following summer. She plants it every fall in the bed along the fence, cloves pointed up, a hand apart, then covers the row with straw and leaves it alone all winter.
She is seventy, and the row goes in whether or not the year has been good to her. Something got said about her last spring, it came back to her secondhand the way it always does, it was not true, and there is no sentence she can say to anybody that will unsay it.
For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. The people who first read that are called foreigners and exiles, with no position to answer a neighborhood rumor from, and they are told to live so well in front of the people around them that the ones accusing them of doing wrong end up seeing the good work and giving God the glory for it.
So the reply they are handed is made out of ordinary conduct, and it takes seasons. Peter says the talk gets silenced. He does not say the neighbors will ever admit anything, and he does not put a date on it. The silencing belongs to God, and their own part is whatever they do on a plain Thursday.
The faster reply is always there. She could tell the version of the story to the one person guaranteed to take her side. There is also the perfect sentence, rehearsed at the fence line and never used.
She will be out there in October anyway, hands in cold dirt, putting in a row that shows her nothing until the middle of next summer.
A Prayer to Remember
Thank you for the people who heard it and did not pass it on. I do not know their names and you do. Keep my hands on what is actually mine this week, the work in front of me and the people in my house. I have been building a case since spring. Take it out of my hands.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
