The Measure Of Our Walk With God Isn’t In Results, But Faithfulness
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(OPINION) I don’t know how many newspaper columns I’ve written. I’d guess well over a thousand. Probably more, but we’ll call it a thousand.
Of those thousand columns, I could count on my fingers the ones I think were any good. My efforts have consistently fallen short of my aspirations. Week after week, year after year.
Yet here I am, entering the month in which I’ll turn 70, still sweating over these little essays.
I feel the same way about my preaching. I’m fast sneaking up on 50 years as a minister. I’ve delivered far more sermons than I’ve written columns — maybe 4,000? — and I’ve rarely stepped out of the pulpit that I didn’t feel like a doofus.
Which raises obvious questions: If that’s how I feel, why didn’t I just quit? Why not get a job driving an Ale-8-One truck or teaching high school history or spraying bugs for Orkin?
I’ve asked myself those questions time without end.
The answer is complicated. But it boils down to this. Long ago, writing and preaching were what I felt called by God to do. That’s not because I thought I could do them better than other people, but because it seemed that’s what God created me for, whatever his reasons. And I responded, “OK, I’ll do that.” Then the doors started opening, with surprisingly little planning on my part. It was as if the Lord shoved me through portals he’d already unlocked.
Because I believe writing columns and preaching is my calling, then with the pain, disappointments and self-doubt have come purpose and joy, too. I’ve been able to help people despite my deficiencies.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Twenty-five years ago, I was nursing my first wife as she wasted away from cancer. Renee slept much of the day, and I needed something to keep me from going nuts. I couldn’t leave the house and couldn’t make any noise.
I decided to pursue an old pipe dream, which was trying to write fiction. I bought a laptop and went to work in the den, where Renee’s sickbed was. I cranked out several short stories.
The most successful — the most successful thing I’ve ever written — was one called “The Faithful.” It was anthologized as one of the best Southern short stories of the decade.
“The Faithful” tells of six old women who are the last surviving members of the fictional Johnson Branch Baptist Church, a rural church they’ve attended their whole lives, just as their parents and grandparents did.
But the world has moved on, the farming community of Johnson Branch has vanished, and the old women must shut down their once thriving place of worship. That church building is as much a living being to them as the kin and neighbors who once filled its pews.
They’re forced by circumstances to hire a student from a Bible college to deliver the final sermon. He’s shallow and gluttonous and bombastic. His message is entirely inappropriate for the occasion — he tries to convince the old women to repent of their sins and get saved. His mousy wife confides in one of the ladies, Lucille, that she never intended to marry a preacher.
When my mom read the story, she laughed aloud at the Bible student and his wife. She recognized, rightly, that I intended them as a self-deprecating caricature of Renee and me.
Recently, for some reason I went back to “The Faithful.” It’s one of those 10 things I’ve written that I like.
For the first time, I understood I was indeed in that story but not as the Bible student. Or at least not as him anymore.
Lucille, the story’s central character, reminisces about Brother Edwin Thomasson, Johnson Branch Baptist’s pastor from when Lucille was a teenager until she was 60. He lies in the church cemetery now, and she misses him keenly.
She reminds the other women of something Brother Edwin used to say: “Folks, I’m not the prettiest man in the county. I ain’t the smartest. But if I can’t do nothing else I can be faithful.”
And his faithfulness helped changed her life for the better. The six women have stayed at the church this long partly as an homage to him. His faithfulness has become theirs.
Walking through the church graveyard, looking at the tombstones of people she loved who have gone to their glory, “Lucille decides she needs to come back next spring, if she lives and keeps her health, and plant new flowers on their graves even if the vandals just trample them down. To her it’s the principle of the thing: You do what you can, and what you should, even if the results are out of your hands.”
In the years since I wrote those words, I’ve grown old myself. My health is breaking down. My congregation has declined. I don’t know what comes next.
In a way, I’ve become Brother Edwin. I didn’t understand when I wrote “The Faithful” that I was writing my own future.
But I’ve kept producing my little imperfect newspaper columns and preaching my little inarticulate sermons, even as the crowds wandered away and my energy waned.
To me, as to Brother Edwin, it’s all about being faithful. You do what you can, and what you should, even if the results are out of your hands. Of course the results are always out of your hands. You plant flowers even if the vandals trample them down.
Fortunately, God doesn’t judge us based on the results we get.
“It is the one who endures to the end who will be delivered,” Jesus promised.
Brother Edwin, Lucille and I tried to endure to the end.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.