A few weeks ago, I was sitting across the table from our semi-retired pastor and next to a single mom friend in an old, slightly leaning house where we meet twice a month for Bible study.
The group, meeting in coastal northeast Japan, has shrunk considerably. Two elderly women aren’t able to come anymore, and a few other people have dropped off for various reasons (health, scheduling, interest). What I’m saying is that it’s not an impressive-looking group in an impressive-looking place, and it represents the opposite of church growth.
Yet here I am, weeks later, still thinking about that time.
Our pastor chose the parable of the workers from Matthew 20 to read together and discuss. At one point, I shared a memory of reading it to my grandpa (my namesake) when I was a senior in college. He wasn’t in good health, and I wasn’t sure if he was confident about what would happen to him after he died despite hearing the gospel hundreds of times in his 90+ years. I remember feeling both afraid and desperate as I said, “Grandpa, it’s never too late to come to Jesus.”
My memory is fuzzy, but I remember him repeating a prayer after me and feeling conflicted. I was happy and relieved, yet I also wondered, “Is this it?” Meaning: is God pleased with these simplistic, formulaic, repeat-after-me prayers?
Is this really what “surrendering to Jesus” looks like? God, is your grace big and broad enough for a quirky old man with all sorts of bottled and buried trauma who also has demonstrated remarkable courage, generosity, and grit? Will you accept this parroted salvation prayer from the mouth of an ornery old man who loves his granddaughter enough to humor her even while holding onto decades of deep doubt? Will you accept this half-hearted prayer from him led by half-doubting me?
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this – and probably dinner plans, too – and was only half-listening to the pastor. Then I heard him ask, “Why do you think these workers weren’t chosen earlier?”
What followed was a lovely, grace-filled discussion that reframed the passage for me from picturing some lazy bums standing around not wanting to work to picturing people who had been picked over. How have I missed considering that perhaps it wasn’t their fault for not being chosen earlier – perhaps having been considered to be too old, too weak, or too “other?” Why did I assume it was because they slept in from playing video games too late the night before?
My reaction to the passage went from, “Wow, God is so compassionate to a group of undeserving bums” to, “Wow, God is so generous to people who weren’t chosen first or seen as high-capacity.” I thought about the many times I’ve categorized people as high or low capacity, valuing people differently based on my arbitrary and inappropriate rating of them.
I remembered a season when I read this passage and marveled at God’s grace and generosity (“God, you see and know me, and you’d still include me?”). Then at some point I started to think of myself as a Group One worker – the professional Christian who has given “my best years” to this missions thing. And I even started looking down on others. Um, is that the best you can do? Is that really all you can do? (Uglier still was thinking that I deserved more. Blech.)
At the same time, I regularly wrestle with wondering if God is disappointed in me. After all, I’m from a stable, Christian home, many people have invested in me, and I’ve had lots of educational opportunities. I should be doing more, producing more, “bearing” more in a John 15 kind of way.
Yet I’m getting older, and I know I don’t have the energy I had when I was younger. I have four energetic, bouncy, emotional boys as well as a different lifestyle here in Japan with laundry, food, and life taking more time and energy than in the US. I’m not complaining about this, and I don’t think it’s better or worse. Just different.
Additionally, despite my Xena, Warrior Princess-esque fantasies, I am quite ordinary. I am rather average at Japanese. Only my mom knows how I scored on a language learning aptitude test that she monitored in 2005. Only I know how grave and concerned she was by the end.
I’m average or well-below average in all sorts of other things – math, proof-reading, controlling my temper, technology, showing grace to prickly people. More still, I have always had and likely will always have trouble focusing. Saying sternly in the mirror, “Focus and try harder, Squirrel Brain” has yet to yield positive, long-term results.
Then there’s the weight of my own losses and sadness in addition to hearing, holding, and absorbing others’ stories. This grief has lowered my capacity. I’m not trying to sound special or more sensitive, but this is part of who I am, too, and it means I’m not the high-producing 6 am worker bee I thought and hoped I’d be.
For years I had thought of myself as a strong, able-bodied, capable, and fairly high-capacity person. Now I see myself as a rapidly graying woman walking with a limp – someone who doesn’t have the capacity she thought she had. I try to picture God not being cranky or stingy toward the 12 pm or 3 pm workers who haven’t produced as much. Instead, I imagine him eager and generous, greeting his children not with a side-mouthed, “Hey, ya could have worked a little harder” but with his arms wide and saying, “I choose you! And I’m so glad you’re here!”
As I listened to our pastor, a man who is steady, kind, and thoughtful, I marveled at how he doesn’t seem to judge others’ capacity like I do. He doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest that the landowner in this parable gave all the workers the same reward. This is a man who has worked harder for God and sacrificed more for him than most people I know, and there he was with two tired moms, grinning about God’s generosity. It was like he knew this fun little secret that he wanted to share with us – that God’s grace is big and broad enough for us – no matter who we are or how hard we serve or how long we’ve been following Jesus.
