Psalm 100:5 “For the Lord is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continues through all generations.“
They started yesterday. The workers arrived early to begin demolishing the two huge boilers that have served us well, kept us warm day by day, week after week, season after season, year after year since they were first turned on in 1963. That’s 60 years!
These inanimate machines have me thinking about faithfulness, and how faithfulness is attached to time. It’s a steady quality, dependable, trustworthy, reliable — and those things take time, which gives us repeated experiences which create trust in the present moment (or not!). Faithfulness is no blind draw, but a proven value with a track record we can trust.
I’m remembering Verna Fogel for her faithfulness. Verna taught our little ones for over 60 years. She got down on the floor with us, wrote notes of encouragement to kids and parents, and ordered her life, really, around what she knew to be her own call to minister the love of Jesus. She started something and stuck with it, week by week, year after year, for decades. Her loving presence was steady, dependable, trustworthy and reliable, so much so that we can’t help but call that space near the door to the parking lot “Miss Verna’s room” even though she left us for glory nine years ago. It was the combination of time, lengthy time with diligent, passionate, focused teaching that is Verna’s legacy. In her own family, Son Steve gathered our junior-highers (with dunkin donuts every week!) for decades himself, and now his son Eric does the same, faithfully. And Marilynn is about all things choir, following after her dad, Ollie… Helpful and servant-hearted in so many ways, over so many years.
Verna would often and repeatedly say to me, with Ollie smiling quietly at her side, “Just tell us about Jesus!”
Taking her example then, Verna’s life and ministry reflected a faithfulness finding it’s origin in the God of steadfast love, a love that takes shape and proves faithful over time and forms others for the same. When we sing to God “Great is Thy Faithfulness” we locate that faithfulness in time and in real history: “Summer and winter and springtime and harvest…a peace that endureth…strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow…morning by morning new mercies I see, all I have needed thy hand hath provided…” Time. And prior experience in that time, in that relationship.
I’m sure that faithfulness is underrated, because it’s not as flashy as other attributes. It’s more steady, coming to life in every season, and through the years. I wonder too in our modern culture of instant gratification and rapid change if it’s also overlooked. Our way of life these days almost won’t allow us a Miss Verna kind of “sticktoitiveness” that forms a faithful life, where we plant our lives down into God’s vineyard and get to work and stay at it in the same community for half a century. Whether in work or in church, we’re on the move. And there’s good things about that too!
I’m told that next week our new furnaces (plural) will arrive. They will be smaller and much more efficient. I only hope too that they will serve us faithfully for the next sixty years. And I’m thankful for life, and the power of the present even challenging moment when saturated with hope and trust in God’s faithfulness. It’s a gift! And a lifestyle I want to pursue for the rest of my days.
Thanks be to God!
PETER HAWKINSON
(This blog is dedicated to the memory of Verna and Ollie Fogel, and their son Steve, and in celebration of the ways their family continue faithfully to love and serve Winnetka Covenant Church!)
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