Christ Our Ballast
Series: Miscellaneous Writings
A meditation.
I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound ; decay crept into my bones, and my legs trembled. Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us. Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength ; He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, He enables me to tread on the heights.
There is something deeply comforting in knowing that God is not tossed to and fro by my every longing and concern. Certainly He stoops to hear me, I know this because He humbled Himself to the cross. But just as well, He does not turn back from His purposes. I know this again because even when the crowd taunted, and His loved ones begged that He should save Himself, Christ set His face towards the Father's will, even up to death on that cross.
The weighty otherness of a God who is steady in His ways is deeply comforting to someone as restless as I am. It means I can offer Him all of my anxious thoughts and trust that He will in His time answer them each in perfect totality exactly as He had determined before I spoke a word. It means prayer is not so much pushing God as it is pressing into Him. It means that even in all my foolishness He stands altogether unshaken and offers Himself to me that I may cling to Him who steadies me. He hears me, as He heard Habakkuk, and answers a better and more startling word than I ever seem to expect.
My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold, the winter is past ; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree ripens its figs, and the vines are in blossom ; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away."