Last week we visited a team whose trajectory has been slow and steady, small and sure. No dramatic earth-shattering victories that broadcast we are on the winning team. But dozens of friendships that lend a reflective pause to refugees whose roots are in desert hostilities and whose present includes a crowded urban landscape. Small opportunities for people to feel heard and seen, to know that there is a God who cares. Similar to Hagar (in origin and in experience) who learned the same things in Genesis 16 and 21.
This work is the work of incremental mending (seems to be a 2024 theme), of a handful of people taking small steps in the direction of healing and blessing for the world. On one team that might be teaching a skill or inviting people into therapy groups, on another it might be rigging oxygen for preems or innovating surgical instruments, and on another giving coaches a vision for mentoring kids in love and truth. None of this work forces change, because real change needs freedom and choice, needs justice in levelling some playing fields to access survival, then solid encouragement to forge a new path, to choose life.
In this world we will have trouble (John 16:33). Jesus was a realist. We have trouble every hour. As he walked into a trap that would take his life as his most trusted friends scattered, Jesus didn't call down fire from heaven or open everyone's eyes to the angels or separate the sheep and the goats for clarity (much as we think we want that). He chose a path of the electric chair, the lynching tree, the public execution, the cross . . . not the throne. Yet he finished his sentence telling his friends to take heart, because in by dying he was overcoming death. The word '"overcome" stems from the greek "nike", victory, a goddess of war and conquering . . . yet the word is used by Jesus in John and Revelation to paint a picture of overcoming that includes perseverance through hardship, returning to the first love, reordering our values, walking into suffering. The grief is real. The anchor of hope will hold, but we feel the extreme strain.
All a long preamble of preaching to ourselves that God calls us into a life that is faithful in the small steps we can take day by day, in how we live and who we help and how we talk and give. The arc is rather too gradual, with wandering steps and slow. As we wrap our minds around a political outcome in America with rhetoric that seems quite far from Jesus' teaching, we are once again with the 11 disciples, unsettled and discouraged but holding on, that we are called to overcome fear and exclusion and greed and derision with good. With love. With empathy and presence for those who are our neighbours who have been directly threatened. With our small lives taking small steps that lift our eyes towards the beauty and truth that Jesus has overcome the world.
