I found this poem when I
remembered singing this hymn that we sang today, and looked it up. So I did an internet search. And I saw the author and through a little
googling realized that the hymn is just five of twenty-two stanzas in John
Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, The Eternal
Goodness. And when I read the poem I
knew that I had to share it with you.
So here is the link, (I encourage you to take the time to read it before continuing below):
The Eternal Goodness by John Greenleaf Whittier
The goodness of God is the
source of our experience of grace.
Grace is the realization that
no matter what, God’s love endures forever,
If you are like me you have
felt beat down by difficult times, illness, uncertainty with health or job or
car or family….
We become beat down, bruised,
and sometimes feel on the brink of breaking.
The prophet Isaiah speaks
about the tenderness of God:
“A bruised reed shall he not
break and the smoking flax shall he not quench” (Isaiah 42:3a)
The God we meet in the
crucified is not unacquainted with suffering, but comes alongside us with
tenderness and empathy and offers us assurance of the goodness that sees
renewal on the other side of suffering.
And this is an immensely
comforting theme in the scriptures to me.
When everything feels
chaotic,
When I feel swamped in fear
or threatened by uncertainty,
When I feel exhausted, and
can identify very much with a bruised reed, with a smoking flax,
I remember the tenderness of
the one who gave me life from the clay.
I remember that it is this
Creator God who made me, who is not cut off, separated from what God has made,
But is intimately interested
in the continuing care and nurturing of the life and beauty of the creation –
There was one time when I
felt so bogged down, so busy, so full of thoughts and worries, that I
frustratedly confessed to a mentor: I am not able to pray and seek God’s
presence.
And that mentor said to
me. But God already is present with you.
Yet, in the maddening maze of
things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit
clings;
I know that God is good!
And we might add. I know that God is here.
The God revealed in the cross
is a God who is not absent from suffering,
But the God who is in the maddening maze of things,
Like an anchor in the storm,
that in our panic we failed to realize was right in front of us.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing;
it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand to be our way of life.”
It is a gift that we are
continually offered. A grace that urges
us to trust in the goodness of God.
And it is a backward looking
gaze of faith as the Psalm today makes clear.
See how God has brought us
from difficulty into greater faith.
See what God has done, behold God’s works in our
story, in the stories of others, in the experience of the Psalmist, in the
experience of the poet.
It’s a backward looking gaze
of faith – we gain assurance and strength by the community of those who have
gone before us – by their trust, by their perseverance.
It is looking to the one who
said “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.”
And faith is a kind of rest
of the heart in God’s eternal goodness.
Within the maddening maze of
things we find an anchor in the goodness of God. And we are reminded that there is something,
someone who will catch us when we fall.
And a love which will sustain us into an uncertain future.
For it is by grace that we
have been saved, are saved, and will be saved through faith. And it’s not a matter of what we do or can
externally amount to – God is not measuring us up to an ideal in order to
decide whether or not we deserve God’s grace.
God is waiting as the still
small voice for our striving and anxious thoughts to clear out and for us to
listen again and feel again the intimate care and goodness that has sustained
creation, is sustaining creation, and will continue to sustain creation into the
fullness of time.
“I know not what the future
hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and
death
His mercy underlies.”
This doesn’t make the
difficult times, the uncertain futures less difficult or uncertain, but take
comfort in the assurance that there is nowhere that we can wander where God’s
steadfast love will not be with us.
“O give thanks to the Lord,
for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever.”
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