Steve West - Plotting the resurrection

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, April 19th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICAHRD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote the famous line in his book Walden: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s WORLD commentator Steve West.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and countless columns for The New Yorker, once reflected on his wife Katherine’s annual late-October planting of bulbs in her garden in what was, at this point, perhaps her last such planting.

“As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion,” White wrote, observing “the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.”

I love that phrase, “plotting the resurrection,” as it suggests the posture believers are encouraged to have in life: faithful, continued perseverance in our usual work, unto God, with hope for its ultimate meaning.

Until a few years ago, I worked each day in a nondescript 1960s-era office building. Every day for 34 years I walked up two flights to my office on the third floor. I switched on the light. I hung up my coat. I sat down and signed into my computer. I listened to messages. I read emails. I made phone calls. I answered emails. I wrote. I read. I moved paper and files from one box to another. I discussed matters. Sometimes, I disagreed with others. I waited. I made more phone calls, answered more e-mails. Then at 5:30, I logged out of my computer, rose, put on my coat, turned off the light, closed the door, walked down the two flights of steps, and waved at the guard as I walked out the door.

The next day, I got up and did it again. Conservatively speaking, I repeated that procedure 4,250 times over the course of 34 years.

This is the quotidian, the everyday and ordinary. Viewed apart from the resurrection, the drudgery of it, the ceaseless repetition, would have weighed heavily on me. A sense of uselessness and meaninglessness could have welled up, creating cynicism, a lackadaisical attitude, even despair.

And yet for the Christian, the most mundane of work is offered up to God and will be taken up by Him and transformed in some as yet unknown way. A continuity exists between the work we do here and the work we do in Heaven. What we do now really means something, tainted though it may be by sin, weighed down by the travail of Creation.

In 1 Corinthians 3:13 Paul looks ahead to Heaven and sees that on that Day “each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it.” The Colossians are told "[w]hatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” Work, no matter how mundane, is what we do, what we are made to do, and God uniquely equips us for certain work or works that we do. And, ultimately, he will sanctify that work, carrying forward all that is good in it to a recreated heavens and earth, to a New Creation.

That's why an old lady plants bulbs in the cold soil of October, just like she always has, year after year, believing that there will be a Spring of new life. That's why I engaged in a 34-year routine of faithfulness to a work that will go on in all that is good. I'm not just plotting my resurrection—God is, and I’m counting on it.

I’m Steve West.

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