Finding Purpose Through Life's Challenges and Sacrifice

The farmer living at the end of our lane had an aging apple tree that had once been abundantly productive but had now lost its energy and ability to bear any fruit at all. The farmer, on an early spring day, I still remembered, hammered eight nails, long and rusty, into the trunk of the tree. [00:01:24]

The tired old tree, having been goaded back to life, produced a crop of juicy red apples bigger and better than we had seen before. When I asked how this had happened, the farmer explained, hammering in the rusty nails gave it a shock to remind it that its job is to produce apples. [00:01:54]

In the 1980s, when I was nearly 80 years old, I had some fairly large rusty nails hammered into my trunk: a quintuple bypassed heart surgery, a new left hip, a dental rebuilding, an attack of permanent vertigo, and like a sensible apple tree, I resolved to resume bearing fruit. [00:02:50]

John Milton, of course, was a Puritan poet and writer. He was blind. Interestingly, Elanor Stump writes about John Milton in the book that we're going to be looking at through this series, Wandering in Darkness. Milton's hard desire was to be a political bureaucrat for Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. [00:03:22]

Milton was left destitute, impoverished, under house arrest, searched for to be imprisoned, and it was in those years that he wrote his great poetry: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes. She says his greatest flourishing came with his greatest suffering. The lesson of the nails so strange. [00:03:48]

When I consider how my light is spent or half my days in this dark world and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide, lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent to serve there with my maker and present my true account lest he returning chide. [00:04:21]

I have a job. I'm a pastor and a husband and a father and a preacher and a storyteller and a father and a grandfather, and I have had some rusty nails hammered into my trunk in this last season, and they are not the end of my story. I am a steward of those wounds as well. [00:05:20]

You have a job, you have a purpose on this Earth, and I promise you when you get to the end of it, your primary memory, the primary meaning of your life, no matter how great your suffering, and I don't mean to minimize it or try to explain it or rationalize it at all, but what will mean the most to you is the fruit that you bore. [00:05:51]

For it is in the bearing of fruit, in noticing a child that nobody else notices or drawing a tear or giving a gift to another person that can make a difference in their life or fixing the car for a single mom who couldn't afford to get it repaired herself or sponsoring a child or beginning to care for folks in some other part of the world. [00:06:24]

There was a couple there, Hank and Jan, and I'd love to talk about them. Hank was a remarkably gifted guy, very successful business guy, and it was clear that was how he was going to make his mark on the world. But when she was 40, Jan was diagnosed with a very debilitating disease, and it just kept getting worse. [00:07:16]

Hank ended up quitting his job to devote himself to caring for her. That did not look like much of an orchard, but I will tell you people were more inspired by that couple and their love and sacrifice for one another than they would have been inspired by all kinds of grandiose achievements. [00:07:38]

Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this, that the world's religions, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism with the pain of Israel in slavery in Egypt, and of course, Christianity, and Christianity especially at the cross, are born out of pain. How ironic it is that today the most widely recognized symbol in all of human history. [00:08:56]