Your Labor Is Not in Vain

A new and wonderful and used-to-be familiar thing is happening in our neighborhood – there are kids on the playground at Mulick Park Elementary School. Last week Tuesday morning Emma noticed some signs put up by the school: ‘We’re so glad you’re back! Your friends at Evergreen Elementary.’ (Evergreen is the Christian school across the street from Mulick Park Elementary School, and it was beautiful to see them reaching out this way.) The traffic has increased. More school buses are driving through the early morning darkness. And you can see kids swinging on the swings and playing!

And all of last week and this week, the song Your Labor Is Not in Vain by the Porter’s Gate has been running through my mind, especially these last few verses:

Your labor is not in vain
The vineyards you plant will bear fruit
The fields will sing out and rejoice with the truth
For all that is old will at last be made new
The vineyards you plant will bear fruit
I am with you, I am with you
I am with you, I am with you
For I have called you, called you by name

Your labor is not in vain
The houses you labored to build
Will finally with laughter and joy be filled
The serpent that hurts and destroys will be killed
And all that is broken be healed
I am with you, I am with you
I am with you, I am with you
For I have called you, called you by name
Your labor is not in vain

Playgrounds full of the sound of children again, after months of waiting and praying and hoping and wearing masks, and limiting our interactions and gatherings, and being cautious. My heart is full of gratitude. Gratitude for answered prayers, for the sight of children being children and doing something normal – going to school. And I am so thankful that Bri, and hopefully other children in our congregation, is getting to be in person again.

I am grateful and singing this song about vineyards bearing fruit and brokenness being healed, and at the same time I’ve been surprised by the grief that has come hand in hand with the gratitude. Grief for what’s been lost – so many losses – so many things we’d anticipated that couldn’t happen as we’d hoped, and so many people gone too. And grief that things are still so far from right or good or normal. It seems so long.

I feel like the pandemic, and particularly this stage of it, is deepening my experiences of both gratitude and grief. Maybe there’s something about having the vaccine, and more of a possibility of an end in sight that creates the space to feel both so strongly. I’m weary too, I think we’re all weary. And in the weariness, it’s good to do both - to give thanks and to grieve. To keep noticing what we’ve been given. To keep thanking the people who bless and sustain us. And to name and mourn the losses. We need to do both, so that we don’t ‘lose heart,’ as the author of Hebrews writes.

One of the books I’m reading these days is Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal by Rachel Naomi Remen. I read yesterday, ‘...we have in us both sides of everything.... Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity.’

The refrain of the song repeats God’s promise: ‘I am with you, I am with you.’ We are not alone in our weariness, or in our gratitude or in our grief, or in whatever we are experiencing. God promises, ‘I am with you, I am with you’ and one day all that is broken will be healed.