Well, that was a nasty bug. I’m used to riding them out, but that one took me down right and proper. It’s the first time I’ve had to call in sick on a Sunday in almost six years in ministry; and here over 40 hours from first onset, I’m still feeling pretty muzzy.This has left me with time to think, but not much working in the brainpan to do the thinking with; but in the altogether unsurprising fact that the church kept right on running without me, it has been a reminder that in all these things, God is at work. He takes our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures, our faithfulness and our rebellion, and he uses all of it; which is not to say that it isn’t better to be faithful than to be rebellious, but simply to note that it’s beyond our ability even to surprise God, much less to derail him (though we can both delight and grieve him). Even if we devoted everything we had to trying to ruin his work, we would still find that he’d used what we’d done to accomplish his purposes.That’s not precisely what this poem, one of my favorites, is about; but there’s a common truth here, I think.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins