Don't Lose Heart

Jesus has a story he wants to share with everyone's who's beat up or broken down

Are any of you worn down? Anyone on the verge of losing heart?

On a recent morning run, I crossed the little bridge passing over a low marsh field. There’s often an eddy of fog there, making it difficult to see past the wispy velvet curtain. It’s a motif for our past year, facing a health crisis with one of our sons — fog, fading light, aching hearts. Plodding past, my anger caught me off guard. Are you ever going to give us a break, God, even a tiny one? Do you care…at all?

I have a friend grieving a parent’s death who, at the same time, caught the blunt end of “corporate restructuring.” He’s overqualified for every job he’s applied for, which makes his empty email inbox all the more infuriating. How do you tend to sorrow when you’re exerting every shred of energy trying to keep half a step ahead of the bills?

I have a friend who’s suffering a long estrangement from a parent. And several whose marriages have shattered. And friends, each with a terminal diagnosis, who occupy my prayers every morning. Then there’s the kids we know who are crushed by anxiety, who feel utterly lost, who’ve checked out on their family. There are businesses gone belly up. Friendships decimated. Immigrants terrified about their children’s future. So many people who are threadbare, numb, despondent. And how many times have we prayed for Gaza and Israel, for Ukraine and Myanmar and Sudan?

Add your heartbreak to the litany. Or if you’re experiencing joy and solace (thanks be to God, we’ll take every win), then I know you could add the sadness of ones you love.

Jesus has a story he wants to tell each of us who are bent low. A story for those of us whose hearts still cling to hope, but barely.

A widow was in real trouble, Jesus says, desperate for help (Luke 18:1-8). And she appeals to a judge whose job it was to help, the one person responsible to intervene. But this judge was a scoundrel, a glad-hander, a power-monger. Slick promises, a well-oiled campaign speech (or Sunday sermon), but zero intentions of lifting a finger unless it padded his wallet or swelled his ego.

But this widow’s a hound, elbows through this shady operator’s smugness and avarice. Finally, badgered and nettled — and only to get the belligerent woman off his back — this louse of a judge relents and finally gives the widow her justice.

What an odd, unnerving, unsatisfying story. How does a parable about an oppressed woman having to twist and goad and harass to get relief provide any comfort to those of us who fear being abandoned by a deity’s inscrutable whims?

But there’s striking good news at precisely this point. Here’s what Jesus wants to make certain we hear: God is not like that judge.

Augustine insists Jesus’ story is not an allegory, the judge standing in for God, but a contrast, a tale of opposites. If even the most wicked and incompetent powers in this world can somehow by some miracle of the universe be moved to act — imagine how eager the One who exists as pure love and generosity will be to intervene, to move toward us and for us. With this good God, we are never on our own.

We don’t need to harangue God to grant us pity. God is not miserly with mercy. Our God longs to help us. Jesus reveals how the entire human story, beginning to end, is God moving toward us. God descending into our trouble and gloom. God immersed within — consuming within his own self — our pain and heartbreak. God would rather die than leave us alone in our suffering.

Of course, we still must reckon with our heavy souls and burdened minds and tortured world here and now. We grapple with the unanswerable quandary of when God will act, how God will help. Love — and this truth is both hopeful and maddening — weaves a very long story. “The answer is in a story,” writes the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, “and the story isn’t finished.”

But in our protracted seasons of travail, we face a real danger: we might give up, we might surrender to despair. This is why I’m telling you about the widow and the evil judge, Jesus says, I am telling you this story so you will keep praying and not lose heart.

Friends, don’t lose heart — your God is with you. God will act and help, and somehow, by the time we reach the end, the worn threads will be whole again. Each Sunday in the Eucharist, we “lift up our hearts.” We must lift them again and again, through every sorrow and uncertainty, in every dark night. We must lift them to the God who loves us. What else are we going to do?

Th road is weary, I know, and the burden heavy. But don’t lose heart.