What
you may not know about L.M. Montgomery (author of the acclaimed Anne of Green Gables series) is that she
was one of the most accomplished and published short story writers of her
time. She wrote, in 1930, my favorite of
her short stories, entitled “The Price” (published in the collected After Many Days).
In this story, a flibbertigibbet named Christine believes that she has
accidentally poisoned her beloved aunt through carelessness and
self-indulgence. After inheriting all of
her aunt’s vast wealth, Christine embarks on a journey of guilt-laden,
secretive punishment. To this end, she
engages only in activities she finds annoying, boring or abhorrent. One of these activities is to force herself
to read her Bible daily.
Ah, but
in engaging regularly with the Word of God, Christine finds something interesting:
she has grown to love it. Montgomery
writes:
“One month, eight years after [her
aunt’s] death, she suffered from a slight but uncomfortable affection of the
eyes, and she could not read at all.
Then she discovered that she missed her Bible, that she had come to
enjoy it. From that time she never
opened her Bible again. . . . Yet, she had read through it so often that it had
become part of her: its philosophy, its poetry, its drama, its ageless,
incredible wisdom – of earth and of spirit, its unexampled range of colourful
human nature were hers inalienably, permeating her soul and intellect.”
In the
story, Christine never seems to find this sort of joy in most of her other acts
of self-denial. The housecleaning she
does by herself: nope. The ugly clothes
she makes herself wear: uh-uh. Shutting
herself off from the man she loves: no warm-fuzzies in that. Maybe after the Bible had “become a part of
her,” she did find a measure of joy; the story does not say. She certainly
changes over the span from the tragic beginning to the hopeful and happy end;
and, I think, what started the real change was her submitting herself to
spending time with God. What Ms. Montgomery captured so well is what every
believer comes to know: you cannot encounter your Creator, especially with any
regularity of practice, and not come away as the old song says, “filled with
His goodness, lost in His love.” He is
so completely what we need, that in seeking Him, we are never left
unsatisfied. And He can come and redeem
the time in unexpected ways or places.
This
past May, I began to run regularly. The
combination of a muffining top, doubling chin, and desire simply to wear the
clothes I already had without lamentable “up-a-size” shopping trip finally
roused me out of complacency and away from my pie and into running shoes. Here’s an open secret: I hate running. That runner’s high that my more enthusiastic
pavement-pounding compadres rave about?
Yeah, I don’t get that. I would bet that they were making it up, except
for the fact that so many of them are good Christian women who would not engage
in such blatant prevarication. So, there
is good in running that I don’t get. The
good that I do get is that my muffin
top has melted away and I’m getting by with one chin and old clothes. Huzzah!
But, you know, I almost did not get this far.
In the
beginning, every day when I would run, I
would look for something to take my mind off of the hideous fact that I was,
well, running. I tried music, but the
headphones kept falling off and out and driving me nuts. I tried chanting, but my chant tended toward
the rather dark repetition of “I hate this. I hate this. I hate this.”
Then, I tried to change my chant to “Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes, yes
Lord.” But, it never took long for that
to regress to the former. So, there I
was: doing my best to keep to a benign, yet loathsome, physical activity and
failing utterly to find a way to keep motivated. So, I started arguing with God.
It
probably started with something like, “Why, God? Why do you make the best foods so full of
calories and the healthiest foods so comparatively blah? And why can’t I just be one of those
fortunate few on whom pounds find no sticking place? Huh?” What bad prayers! The Bible doesn’t tell us only to pray good
prayers, though. God wants us, ideally,
to pray without ceasing. Because we are
bad people, we will pray bad prayers; but, our good God can surely separate
wheat from chaff here as elsewhere. And
He wants us to come to Him regardless. I
am sure that my first running prayers were grouchy, complaining ones. But, they did not stay that way.
It
really did not take long for me to run out of steam with my arguing. One of my favorite Rich Mullins songs has a
line: you can argue with your Maker, but you know that you just can’t win. Amen!
Soon, the other, better prayers started pouring forth. Hopes, fears,
dreams, worries, expressions of gratitude, tears of repentance, psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs . . . the time started to fly! I was running three, four, five, ten miles
and loving it. Not the running, mind you,
but the time with my beautiful Savior. Unexpected.
I have
always loved to pray; but, like so many, I get distracted easily at home. Every time, it seems, that I set aside a good
chunk of knees-on-the-ground time, my prayers will early on be interrupted by
my racing thoughts -- usually a memory of something I had read that would totally
back up what I was saying in prayer; so, I will stop praying and go try to find
the book or magazine, because, as we all know, God totally needs proper
citation when you’re by prayer and supplication, with
thanksgiving, letting your requests be made known to Him. Oh, I frustrate myself mightily with my lack of discipline! “Squirrel!”
It’s different when I run.
Nothing can distract me from taking everything to Him, and take it I do.
And it has become such a part of my life
now that I do not know how I would go on without this almost daily returning to
companionship with my truest Friend.
And
that is why I have always loved “The Price.”
It rings true. Every time I have
done what Christine did and simply made space and time to immerse myself in the
Spirit of the Living God – whether by reading His word, serving His people, or
fellowshipping with Him in prayer – I have been met anew and surprised again by
His manifold goodness. It really does
not matter how rebellious my heart is in the beginning. He will turn it
around. I, who have expended so much
time over the years trying to be filled with pie, always find that I am best
fed when in His company. It is still,
after all these years, unexpected. By
why should it be? Is not the truth of
what I’ve found written on every page of our Bible – that fountain of ageless
wisdom that becomes ours inalienably, permeating our souls and intellect? It is imprinted, indeed, on every verse as surely as in every heart that seeks His face.
