Want to get away?
posted by Hatty
Today, right after a meeting that didn’t go as well as I had hoped, I slowly sat back down in front of my work computer, hoping to distract myself from the frustrating reality that is work. My somewhat defeated mental state had less to do with a case of the Mondays and more to do with the thought that maybe, even after a million Mondays spent here, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
Community organizing is not an easy job, I know. But a daily reminder of the broken healthcare system, a broken swing in the playground, and broken people doesn’t always lift me up to a place where I see the bigger picture — why I, along with the rest of humankind, am and will work another million Mondays to hope for a more just and more beautiful world to live in.
So what to do when coffee had expired in my body and still I faced more hours of listing the broken things in my neighborhood, the dark side of San Francisco? I did what any sane person would do when felt trapped by your physical reality contradicting what you believed to be true. I prayed.
Well, not exactly. I stumbled across a poem while rummaging through a pile of pictures and postcards I had been meaning to put up around my desk space. There it was, on a half sheet of legal-sized paper, printed neatly in Times New Romans 12. I found the distraction I was looking for nonetheless, confirming not what I saw here and now, but rather what I had yet to see.
I pinned the poem on my wall, breathed, returned to the community benefits agreement.
It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No programme accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
— Archbishop Oscar Romero
