Faces on Faith: Be swift to love and make haste to be kind
When I retired from full time ministry five years ago, I had to decide where I was going to worship. It is not possible to move from chancel to pew in the church you have served for 29 years. As I settled into a new congregation and got use to the Sunday liturgy, I found myself at home. At the end of the service, before the final blessing, the rector would often say these words from Henri Amiel:
“Life is short and we do not have time too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. So be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.”
Yes, life is short and the older you are the shorter it is. This is not to be morbid, but realistic. There are only so many years, months, days, weeks that you have and you can use that time to do many things. Add to this that we presently live in a world and in a nation that seems to be more and more angry and nasty; where national leaders seek not so much to unite but to divide, and where the least and the lowest are not lifted up but put down. As one who has sought my whole adult life to witness in my own faltering way to the way of Jesus, I am angry and depressed. What can I do here? Yes I can speak out; I can vote; I can preach the gospel of God’s love for one and all, but so often it seems as if all my efforts are overwhelmed in the flood which seems to be rising each and every day.
Someone said once, “You can’t do everything, but you can do something.” Amiel’s words remind me of that. In the little time there is I can “be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” At the heart of things are relationships, real live human beings who laugh and cry, live and die, who try day in and day out to make it through the day, the week, the month, the year, even in the midst of the mess that we’re in.
Some of the people I’m called on to be swift to love are not very loveable. They are cracked and broken and flawed, but then I remember a quote from the late songwriter Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” And sometimes I’m not particularly loveable and I’ve got a lot of cracks, but that’s also how the light gets out.
Vance Havner writes: “God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop; broken clouds to give rain; broken grains to give bread, broken bread to give strength.”
I’m working on this, I’m really trying.
The Rev. John Cedarleaf is the pastor at the Captiva Chapel by the Sea.