Living Right On
Dear Hope Church Family,
Recently, I had my credentials as a serious reader questioned when I admitted to not having read anything from Wendell Berry. Apparently, he’s up there with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and I had no idea (gasp!). So, I took a recommendation to start with Hannah Coulter. I enjoyed the book, but much in the same way you enjoy an evening hour on a porch swing in the summer. However, I wasn’t wowed and quickly moved on to the next book in my queue.
So, I was surprised when, a week later, the book had taken root in my mind, the characters and themes growing into something more. One particular mantra, “We’ll live right on,” kept coming back to me. It was an oft-repeated phrase of Hannah and her husband, Nathan. Sometimes it was a rallying cry, pressing them onward, through the valley. At other times, it was a statement of identity; they are people who endure and persevere whatever life brings their way. And at times, a simple acknowledgement that there is only one choice regardless of how unbearable life is: We’ll live right on.
I know that right now many of you are in hard seasons. Cancer, life-altering health conditions, children who need more than you can provide, loneliness and despair. Many days it all seems so unbearable, the pain I see around me and experience in my own life. And, when I widen my view beyond my immediate circle to the other side of our city or the other side of the world, I feel like a drowning woman, unable to keep my head above the chaotic sea of a fallen world. And yet, we live right on. Many of you are living right on even as the ground shifts under your feet.
Ecclesiastes wrestles largely with the futility of lives overshadowed by death and suffering. If everything under the sun is temporary, what is the point, especially when life becomes unbearable? Yet, the writer finds wisdom in this: “Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot” (Ecclesiastes 5:18). In much the same way, I think Hannah and Nathan were able to live right on through both good and hard seasons of life, because they received with joy what God had provided: food for their table, work for their hands, friends and family for their hearts. In their life of active gratitude, they were able to enjoy the few days of their lives God had given them through every season.
If you haven’t read the book, add it to your summer reading list. I’d love to talk to you about it!
Blessings, Sarah Beam