God has gifted us all with seven days per week. Like beads, he strings them together with a sturdy thread of words—read, spoken, even written.
The pattern of my beads is simple: I spend three days a week in a small house, in a small town, doing ordinary, necessary things; having ordinary and necessary conversations. On those days, my commute to my office is brief; down a short hall (hung with two bold paintings by an old friend, and two old windows with peeling white paint) and around the corner to a small office with a big window and a tiny desk.
I love those days, strung as they are with exquisitely common words.
Four days a week, I have a longer commute, through an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of sky and prairie. Sometimes I stop to snap a photo, or watch the harvest, or marvel at a hovering flock of migratory birds, practicing for their long flight to southern summer. In winter I stop simply to catch breath stolen by hoar frost, glittering under pale winter sun like a mosaic of shattered mirrors.
In a large town, I sit behind a tall desk in a spacious office. Those days too, slip by on a string of words—precise, neatly packaged, vigilantly administered and distributed. I enjoy using them, and gratitude for the privilege overwhelms me sometimes. But after four days, I lock the office doors, and leave those words behind. They are of little use to a common life, full of pots and tots and simple joys.
Some days in the seven seem like a shoestring and some, a tightrope. Sometimes the beads of those days chip and break off entirely; wasted and useless. Feeling frayed and fragmented, I long for a reminder that I am held together by a stronger Word. By holy string. I know precisely where to find it.
My Bible, its spine worn bare, looks common enough. But its words—nothing common there—pierce me through like filament on fire. No wonder. They are eternal, and they are alive. God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—inhabits them. Listen:
In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
Not a God, note. Not one of many. God the Creator, and yes, God the destroyer. Melting. Mending. Melding. The Word. Jesus Christ. Full bore, no holds barred. From the beginning, powerful on the page, and through the Holy Spirit, living and active in me—in all his followers.
Fellow follower, even on shoestring, tightrope days, when you don’t feel very held together, believe it: when the beads are flying off, the holy string called the Word remains untouched by our weakness. Suspended between heaven and earth, and threaded through all our common days, the Word is infinitely stronger than a steel cable.
Grab the holy string.