Some years ago, when I worked in the office
of a factory in Norfolk, I knocked on the door of my boss, the management accountant. He could see from the file of papers in my hand that I had a problem. “Come in,” he smiled, squaring up the piles on his already crowded desk. “Let’s start another layer.” Those words, and the picture that goes with
them, have stayed with me, and I feel they have something to teach us about God.
First of all came the welcome. It was clear from the cluttered desk that
Keith was already busy. However, he
realized that resolving my difficulty would release me to be productive
again. So he put aside the problems he
was tackling, and ushered me in; and, typical of the good working relationship
that we enjoyed, his smile put me at my ease: I didn't have to worry that I'd disturbed him. Remember that, whether we are
complaining about the neighbours, asking for help with relationships, or simply
saying ‘thank you’ for a wonderful night out, God is never too busy to listen
to our prayers. His welcome mat is always out!
Secondly, there was a lesson in tidiness: in being methodical about things. Seeing
that my visit would involve at the very least spreading out the various items I’d brought, in order to explain my problem, Keith made sure that his own
files were tidy, so that they wouldn’t become mixed up with those I was about
to introduce. When did you last have the
feeling that, when God was speaking to you, the message had been misdirected,
and was actually intended for someone along the road? I’d guess never. In the
conversations we have with one another, there is always the
possibility of our mind going off at a tangent, as we think about our own
affairs instead of following the thread of what is being said to us. Then we might have to ask for something to be
repeated, or worse hazard a guess at what it was we missed. God always listens with His full attention to
what we want to tell Him, or ask Him.
Each of us is special to Him, and our individual needs are known and
understood. So we can be assured that
the answer we get is the answer to our problems, even if it at first it might not
seem so. It could mean, for instance, that we have to do something for
someone else in order to sort out our own lives.
And lastly comes a
lesson in perseverance. As a boy, I
remember, there were often lots of things in my room that were started, but
left incomplete when my interest wandered to something else, and my father
would ask in exasperation, “Why don’t you finish one thing before you go on to
something else?” Now, we all know that for a
successful manager life just isn’t like that.
Often, to have
one’s finger on the pulse of many aspects of the operation for which one is
responsible, it’s necessary to keep several balls in the air at once. Ultimately, however, all of those tasks will have to be completed. For Keith, that meant
inviting me to ‘start another layer’ on his desk, while remembering that when I withdrew, he’d have to carry on where he’d left off, and that
when that job was done, the one underneath it would need to be tackled afresh, and so
on.
In the case of our
Creator, we must remember that God’s timing isn’t how we understand time. St Peter reminds us that, “a single day is
like a thousand years with the Lord and a thousand years are like a single day”
(2 Peter 3:8). Nothing is left
unfinished on God’s desk. Even if we feel it’s taking longer than we’d like
for something to be sorted out, we know that, in God’s good time, that’s what
will happen. We can take heart from
Jesus’ words from the Cross, “It is finished”: not even the salvation of the
world fell through the all-encompassing net of God’s ‘to-do list’.
