Make Hay
You have heard that proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.” It is advising seizing an opportunity, taking advantage of favorable conditions, good situations to obtain the outcome dear to you. When conditions are perfect, you get something done. You are making the most of your opportunities. The radicalized application of this proverb is to broaden the scope and to see the full range of your days in this life as your opportunity to make the most of what you have.
In this view, you would be attempting to invest your great efforts in good conditions and bad, in favorable situations and unfavorable. After all, no one has a flat smooth flight all through life; all encounter frequent turbulence. Peaks and valleys, to change the metaphor, are our mainstay, not our exception. Something inside us urges us to make hay, despite the situation. Related popular proverbs that come to mind are: “Life is short;” “Seize the day;” even, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Apply also, if you can the prayer phrase from this Sunday’s psalm we probably don’t know, “May the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us; prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork.” —Psalm 90:17.
Maybe there is no time to waste, maybe every day is the day to stay diligent, to make the most of that day. I know this is an ideal, easy to say, and hard to do because our mood, fatigue, and distractibility have other suggestions for us. I am willing to do better, realizing I have a limited number of days. “Lord, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12. You are the expert in your life to know what that would mean for you. You will know what specifically you would be diligently pursuing.
Speaking more generally, I find the liturgy themes of the Sunday coming spurring us on to the following theme: You can live on the front lines of fulfillment when you: 1) Find the capacity to trust in a power greater than yourself; 2) Visualize the highest possibilities not even in evidence before you; and 3) Live the risky work of loving unconditionally, not for some merit, but just because. The Collect of the Day for this Sunday asks that we might obtain what God promises, by loving what God commands. Love is what God essentially commands, and that is the avenue for realizing divine promise. Notice in the prayer the lead into this process of realization is a profound request. We ask God to increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity:
Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
— Collect for Sunday closest to 10/26 (BCP p. 235)
These gifts of the Spirit are too easy for us to glide right past, but they are the elements for our making the most of life while we can. Faith is essentially trust, it is an act of the will to rely entirely upon God who is infinitely more trustworthy than the highest qualities we possess in ourselves. Mind you, this is not intellectual assent; it is not a casual mental nod to the existence of God. Faith is a complete and unhesitating dependence upon the reliability of God to support us practically and existentially. Injured hikers put faith in the helicopter team when they are strapped on to the cable to lift them up and out. Patients put faith in the surgical team when they sign the consent and watch the drip of anesthesia begin. Sinners put their faith in the Holy One when they say, I believe…and as the New English version of the opening verse of Psalm 70 expresses, ”Show me favor or God and save me, hasten to help me, O Lord.” Hope is when you say, ”I don’t see the promise in my physical circumstance or in my human capacity, but I see the possibility, looking with my heart.” The eyes of your heart are remade by the Spirit, with this vision you can be confident of the desired outcome. With hope, you have the spark of conviction about what will be, despite the look of things. Charity, a special kind of love is “agape” in Greek. It is gift-love. It is not tied to some aspect of deservedness. It is offered just because. No one can do what Jesus demands, “Love your enemies” without applying this very special kind of love from the very heart of God.
If we really want to make hay while the sun shines, and if we want to see our entire length of days as our personal context of when the sun is shining, we should be diving into these gifts from God: that kind of faith, that kind of hope, that kind of love. Yes, it is going to be a bumpy ride. We should fasten our seat belts, but more powerful than the bumps is our Savior who enables us to obtain what is promised, through the gifts of faith, hope, and charity.