Advent 7

The Archbishop of Canterbury (the head of the Church of England) Justin Welby was speaking about all that overwhelms a person’s work in the world. He had just visited a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the Ebola crisis, where people were unable to get food or medical help because of militia fighting. Some had been rescued, but 12,000 had been left behind because they were too sick to be moved. All he could do was comfort one person at a time. In the face of such overwhelming suffering, Justin lamented to his co-worker that he could do so little and asked, “What do you do? How do you cope with the weight of all this?” His friend replied, “Do what you can. Leave the rest to God.” 

“Your job is to do what you can with the resources God has given you,” Justin explained. “And if that’s very little indeed, it’s very little indeed.” When he came to the edges of what is possible, he turned to the psalms of lament and protest as a way of handing all that cannot be solved by one person over to God. 

God is in the process of redeeming the whole world. And as we wait, our prayers might sound something like this: God, I’m not sure what is happening, or why it’s taking so long, or how I can make any difference. Show me what is mine to do. And hurry up on all the rest. To be able to pray this way is to discover a kind of mental, physical, and emotional settling within ourselves. It’s a balance-point where we realize what is ours to be done with human-sized effort. And we stay hopeful about what God is doing even if we can’t see it yet.

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