Tag: work

The Autumn Wind

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photos of Mt. Baker and cornfield in Whatcom County by Josh Scholten

The old man does believe what the child believed; but how different it is, though still the same. It is the field that once held the seed, now waving and rustling under the autumn wind with the harvest that it holds, yet all the time it has kept the corn. The joy of his life has richened his belief. His sorrow has deepened it. His doubts have sobered it. His enthusiasms have fired it. His labour has purified it.
~Phillips Brooks

I don’t consider myself “old”, at least not quite yet, although my college age patients might look at the graying me, almost three times their age, and think “old.”   Nearing the end of my sixth decade,  I feel the seeds of the younger Emily still within me.   I am the same field, now with soil plowed thoroughly, seed planted deeply, weeds and rocks winnowed regularly, harvest anticipated gratefully.

No one else can do the work of my field in my place.  I am the one who must be willing to get up early, believe in what I need to do every day, exercise flabby muscle, sprinkle with shed tears, fertilize with inspiration gleaned from others’ experience.

The harvest will be sweet when work is purified by blood, sweat, and tears.   Even the younger me understood and believed.

Called to Advent–enduring

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We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it, when we are slandered, we answer kindly.
1 Corinthians 4:12

I wear several different types of gloves in my personal and professional life. At home, every day, as I prepare for barn chores I pull on old work gloves with holes and rips that still manage to protect my hands from blisters and briers as I shovel manure and lift hay bales. During the cold winters, I wear soft mittens when I venture outside. During gardening season, gloves keep my hands and fingernails from getting so grimy that I can’t scrub them clean afterward. During blackberry picking season, I wear protective gloves to help reduce the scratches and pokes from the thorny vines. At work, I don disposable plastic gloves many times a day as I palpate rash lesions, open up abscesses, sew up lacerations, probe orifices. Gloves protect me but also protect my patients.

There are times I wish I could pull a glove over all of me when it is a struggle to endure what life dishes out, when I’m feeling particularly vulnerable, or stretched by responsibility, or worn thin by worry. I know in my heart there is no glove that can buffer me more effectively than His Word. The knowledge of His faithfulness is protection enough to help me endure the hard times.

Then what I put on is holy, but unlike my old well-worn work gloves, this holiness inspires my work to change the world, one shovelful, one trench, one basket of fruit, or one hurting patient at a time.

You can endure change by pondering His permanence.
Max Lucado


Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick