Kitchen Table Wisdom

Original watercolor by C. Dawes

I found an ant in my hymnal the other day.

Not a real one, although that certainly would have gotten my attention.

This one was tucked inside a prayer called “A Refuge amid Distraction,” #535 in The United Methodist Hymnal. The prayer is attributed simply to “Trad. India,” and it begins with the image of an ant on a stick burning at both ends.

I immediately thought of the old saying about burning the candle at both ends, and I know something about that.

I had almost forgotten the girl I was then. I wasn’t twenty yet and was desperately trying to lose weight. A friend offered me what I thought was a caffeine pill.

It was not.; instead, it was a street amphetamine.

I wish I could tell you that once I discovered what it was, I stopped taking it.

I didn’t.

I liked the way it made me feel. I could stay out late, get up the next morning and still function at work. I was losing weight. I had energy. For a while, I thought I had found a way to burn the candle at both ends without running out of candle.

But never running out is an illusion.

Eventually, something gets consumed and—in my case—it was me.

I became very sick. I had to take time off from work, and my doctor warned me that if something didn’t change, I was headed down a path of destruction.

I knew he was right.

I then did something I would never recommend. Because I had already gone several days without the drug while I was sick, I decided I could simply quit cold turkey. I suffered through withdrawal on my own. Please don’t follow my example. Withdrawal from drugs can require medical care.

There is a much longer story behind all of that, but we’d need another pot of coffee for that one.

What matters today is the ant I discovered in my hymnal—and the girl from my past I recognized in it.

I had become that ant without realizing it, running back and forth while both ends of the stick burned. And I was tired.

I remembered the church of my childhood and longed for the peace I had always found there. So, I went back.

I didn’t find what I was looking for right away. But I kept going. Somewhere inside me, I knew the answer I was seeking was there.
I wanted peace.
I wanted rest.
I needed a refuge amid the distractions of fighting my addiction.

What I found was a place to be still.

I didn’t have those words then. It would take me years—no, decades—to discover them. But find them I would.

Years later, when I became a pastor, I remembered enough of that experience to know I wanted the church to be that kind of refuge for other people.

In one of the churches I served early in ministry, we had a wonderful children’s ministry. Some of those children had parents who were struggling with addiction. We knew it. We talked about it, mostly in whispers. We prayed for them. In fact, that church had a thriving, lay-led prayer ministry, and those families were faithfully lifted before God.

I wanted us to begin a recovery ministry.

The church wasn’t ready.

And if I am going to tell this story fairly, neither was its pastor.

I was still new to ministry and hadn’t yet learned how to lead a congregation through that kind of resistance. So, the recovery ministry didn’t happen.

I’ve thought about that many times since.

We prayed for those families. We sincerely wanted God to help them.

I don’t think any of us realized that God might be asking us to become part of the answer to the prayers we were praying.

A year later, I was serving another church when the need for a recovery ministry presented itself again.

I had gained a little wisdom, and I knew we needed a solid place to stand before we tried to build anything. So, I brought those struggling families together and we prayed.

Before the plans, before the program, before deciding exactly what we would do, we intentionally spent time with God. We stopped running away. We became still. We learned to be with God on purpose. That became our cornerstone. And from there, we began to build the ministry.

All of which brings me back to that poor ant.

Its instinct is to run. One end is burning, so it races toward the other. When that end becomes too hot, it turns and runs back again.

But what if the ant could remain still?
The fire might eventually burn itself out.

There are certainly fires we should run from. There are dangerous situations where remaining still is not the answer. Sometimes wisdom means getting out and getting help.

But there are other fires we cannot outrun.

Sometimes our frantic running only exhausts us.

I think I spent a long time confusing distraction with refuge. Distraction helped me keep moving. Refuge gave me somewhere to stand.

Maybe that is part of what I went looking for when I returned to the church all those years ago. And maybe it is part of what the church is meant to offer—not a place where all the fires magically disappear, but a place where weary people can stop running long enough to discover they are not standing there alone.

The prayer in my hymnal ends with a simple declaration:
God’s love is refuge.

Maybe that is what I was looking for when I was the ant running between the burning ends of addiction—a place to be still. I made my way back to the church because I remembered sitting in the pew and finding peace once.

I didn’t have the words refuge amid distraction then.
I just knew I was tired of running.

I used to think refuge meant getting away from whatever was troubling me. But now I know refuge doesn’t always make the fire go away. Sometimes it simply gives us a safe place to be still while the fire burns.

And sometimes, when we pray for someone else who is running between burning ends, God may be asking us to become part of the refuge they are seeking.

Maybe that is when church can be at its best—not when it is a place where every problem is solved, but when it serves as a place where tired people can stop running long enough to discover they are not alone.

Cathy D.

Hymn source: “A Refuge amid Distraction,” The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), no. 535. Attributed in the hymnal to “Trad. India.”