This is what the ancients were commended for.
Hebrews 11:2 (NIV)
The Year You Did Not Write
At the laundromat on the corner a man takes somebody else’s load out of the dryer, folds it, shirts first, and sets the stack on the table instead of on top of the machine. The woman who left it comes back late and knows exactly who did it, because there is nobody else in the place.
Hebrews 11 runs through people who were commended for what they trusted. Noah was warned about things not yet seen, and he built. Abraham was told to go, and he went without knowing where. Most of what those two lived through was ordinary years and bad ones, and none of it could be checked while it was happening.
The ancients were commended, and where the chapter names who did it, it names God. The writer says it is impossible to please God without faith, and that God is not ashamed to be called their God.
Some of the people that chapter commends faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment, and some of them were put to death. Nothing in it softens that for them.
Most of a year gets spent in the middle of it, with no way to stand far enough back and look. The bad months and the good ones arrive in the same week, and you sort them while you are tired.
You have your own way of telling how the year went, and some years it comes out badly whatever measure you use. You are inside something you are not writing, and the writing of it is not yours to check.
She said thank you at the table and again from the door, and he went back to his own load. Somewhere in a year that didn’t go well, one of the things you did was seen, and nobody has gotten around to telling you.
A Prayer to Remember
Whatever this year has been, you knew what it was before I did. Let me keep going this week on the part I cannot see, the part nobody is going to ask me about. I would like to be told how it reads, and I’m asking instead for the next seven days.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
