Summer has been rough.

I guess that's nothing new, but it feels fresh right now. We're still shaking off the dust, gaining our bearings again, and beginning to figure out where to go from here. Or maybe we're still sitting in the dirt, wondering whether we can or should go on. Now more than ever are we blessed with memory. We look at what has come to pass so that we may know what is to come. We have seen our weakness, and seen a strength at work through it. We have known discomfort, only to find that we live in opulence. The road we walk has turned out to be tougher than we are, so that we can't possibly make it through, but we make it still. Our past calls out to our future so loudly that it almost drowns out the groaning present. Ever caught between memory and hope we live, and so we look to the One in Whom the furthest extent of both memory and hope dwell, in Whom we live and move and have our being.


Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings;
I know that God is good!

Not mine to look where cherubim
And seraphs may not see,
But nothing can be good in Him
Which evil is in me.

The wrong that pains my soul below
I dare not throne above,
I know not of His hate,—I know
His goodness and His love.

I dimly guess from blessings known
Of greater out of sight,
And, with the chastened Psalmist, own
His judgments too are right.

I long for household voices gone,
For vanished smiles I long,
But God hath led my dear ones on,
And He can do no wrong.

I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.

And if my heart and flesh are weak
To bear an untried pain,
The bruisèd reed He will not break,
But strengthen and sustain.

John Greenleaf Whittier