Rock of ages

It has become a habit to glance at the mountains that loom over the horizon, as I walk to class every evening. They have become a visual symbol of God’s call for me in this season.

Different people struggle with different challenges in the missions field. Some have a harder time coping while others adjust better. For me, a recurring struggle was, and continues to be monotony.

Life here is pretty much the same everyday. Most mornings, we are at the library by 9am, either for classes, or for team meetings. We close the library at noon, pack lunch and eat at home. Because classes end late in the evening, we have to start preparing dinner once we finish lunch! Then I rest for a while, give myself a caffeine fix, and we head to the library again. I sometimes joke that the 3 minutes it takes to walk to the library in the scorching afternoon sun is the longest 3-minutes of the day! In the afternoons, we prepare for lessons, conduct staff training and start teaching at 5pm. Whoever gets home first will finish up the cooking. After dinner, we watch the local news. By about 9:30pm, we are wiped out, like two old grannies!

It’s only been two months into this schedule, and I confess that the familiar sense of dullness and monotony is sinking in. At the height of my struggle over the monotony in my first year here, I read something in GK Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” that became a lifeline for me. The passage is worth quoting at length.

“The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction…it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them…The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”

The idea that what we consider monotony could perhaps be a manifestation of God’s infinite glory and pleasure at His creation was a thoroughly radical concept for me. A few weeks ago, I thought of this again, as I settled down to watch the sun rise over the eastern mountain range after my morning run at the beach. A light mist shrouded the mountains, which were bathed in a gentle, orange glow. The first rays of sunlight peeking over the mountains cast a beautiful, shimmering reflection on the sea. God makes the sun rise every morning, but He also makes every sunrise different. In the monotony, there is also beauty, for those who have eyes to see.

The profundity of this truth has never left me, although I still struggle to allow it to dominate my thinking, especially on days where everything seems to go wrong, or when nothing seems to be happening. During moments like these, I lift up my eyes and glance at the mountains that rise above the school. I think of God who created them so very long ago, and who continues to take joy in their permanence and stability, and pray that I too, may find joy and meaning in the repetition of events, which by definition, is simply part and parcel of being faithful to a call.