Reflection by Cara Ellen Modisett.
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go? Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused? For what end do we make sacrifices?
Proverbs 3:5-6- “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
Romans 8:28- “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
What difficult questions to answer when we cannot go anywhere. When our doings are centered in familiar, small and constrictive spaces, when we are isolated from the communities and the work and the public spaces that define us every day.
What difficult questions to answer when the greatest movement I feel is every heartbeat shaking my body as I sit in the sunny silence of the afternoon, while children’s voices float in the air outside my doors.
What difficult questions to answer when we are afraid for ourselves and also grieving for others. When we have no insight to rely on, and it is hard to trust what we cannot predict or understand. When God’s purpose is unclear, and some shout punishment and others shout there is no God, and others go into a sleep from which they don’t know if they will wake, and the last compassionate voices they hear are on the other end of a telephone.
It’s easy to see what we believe will be the ends of our doings, the destinations of our journeys, when the world is wide and we are free to roam it, when our routines are in place and we are constantly working and moving in the “endless traffic” of our minds and our everyday lives. We feel a sense of control, that we are in charge and navigating ourselves toward our goals. When the world stops and we must slow ourselves down, we realize that control is illusory.
When the world stops, we begin to understand what is actually guiding our paths, and will bring us to our ends, to destinations we could never have expected and gifts we never thought to ask for.
The answers to these questions are the small spaces, the heartbeats shaking our bodies, the children’s voices on a sunny afternoon, the compassion at the other end of the phone, the love that is the fabric tying all this together. God’s calling is for us to love back, to listen for God’s reminder in these small, familiar and constrictive spaces, the voice that says, your busyness is not the goal. The speed of the world is distracting.
The rhythm of your heart, the voice of the child, the sunny afternoon, are all part of God’s goodness, and they are more important than the goals we set for ourselves and the priorities we worry over. God tells us, find ways to lift up God’s goodness, find ways to love through the isolation and the fear, to mend the fabric and maybe add some new and brighter colors to it. Carry out of this strange and slowed-down time that love, that shifting of purpose to what is greater than we are alone.
Cara Ellen Modisett is a postulant for priesthood in the Episcopal Church but grew up in the United Church of Christ; over the years she has worked as an English teacher, magazine editor, collaborative pianist and radio reporter; she is a 47-year-old native of the Shenandoah Valley and cannot cook (she once knew how to make a grilled cheese sandwich but forgot).