Time and Time Again

For several days in a row, every morning when I came out to my car, there would be a large spider web spun between both cars. It was actually very beautiful. Most mornings, it shimmered in the sunlight with drops of dew hanging like crystals from a chandelier. Then I would walk through, open the door and break the strands as I left for work. What was incredible was that every morning, it would all be rewoven.

Day after day, I destroyed this beautiful, fragile work. Even if I hadn't disturbed it, it was not going to stay in place. And yet every day for nearly a week, I was greeted with this beautiful sight. I don't know how long a week is in that spider's lifetime, but I am sure, the web was a lot of work. How many of us would have kept re-doing the work day after day in the face of destruction?

It is a faith story repeated time and time again in the stories of the Bible. People who persevered, wandering through the desert for forty years and survived and rebuilt after being conquered and exiled only to be conquered again. And yet the Bible is a book of faith stories; of the God who keeps faith with God's people even when they lose hope, give up, or turn away. God is always there, reaching out with forgiveness, making it possible for us to come back. "But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love". (Nehemiah 9:17).

This verse in Nehemiah comes just after verses that recount the ways the Israelites have NOT been faithful and in fact are labeled as "arrogant and stiff-necked". Stubbornness is not generally regarded as a virtue. However, the upside of being stubborn is persistence. Being willing to keep on trying, to work at it again and again; this kind of persistence is valuable and can even be life-saving for people who refuse to give up even in the face of illness and pain.

Jesus counts it as a quality that we ought to have in our prayer life as well. When the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray, he gives us the gift of the Lord's Prayer. Then he goes on to give an example of persistence in prayer. It is after this that we read the words, "Ask, and it will be given you, search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you." It is a lesson inviting us to be persistent in our relationship with God. We do not need to carefully limit our prayers in case we are bothering God too much but instead, we are encouraged to "bother God", to be persistent in our prayers. We can do this knowing that God reaches out to us in love. Read Luke 11:1-13