Today, in a sermon on faithfulness, the guest speaker for today, who happens to be the current president of the church I attend, gave an extended story towards the end of his message on the perseverance of some brethren in a remote part of Zambia that is about five hundred miles away from the capital and about two or three hundred miles from the nearest improved roads. After a trip to the hospital in the early 1980’s, a man came into contact with the church I was born into, requested a bunch of literature, and had a tenuous connection to the goings on of that church until the early 1990’s. At that point, in 1993, contact abruptly stopped, and the brethren in this remote village were left with their existing literature, which they continued to read and study over the next fifteen years, until one of the men went on a legendary journey to the capital, where he happened to meet a deacon at a bus station who noticed his old booklet, and who got him in touch with the minister in the capital, before the man got arrested (and fortunately released) in attempting to travel onto the military base where church services were held after spending several days staying with some refugees he happened to know in the capital. Even after this point, it took until this past Passover for three of the men to be baptized because they were so remote that the level of trust and communication was a difficult matter for them to obtain. The nearest elder lives a couple hundred miles away from them and can only visit them a few times a year, that is how remote and cut off they are from the larger cultural world–there is no internet and barely any communication of any kind. Apart from heroic travels to and from, they may as well be on the mountains of the moon, and yet they have persisted in their belief and in their desire to be connected to the larger body of Christ despite, or maybe because of, their extreme isolation. Such perseverance is a great story worthy of being recorded and remembered.

Yesterday’s ceremony itself was to honor the contributions of our recently retired pastor after 50 years of service and marriage, and also to honor our slightly less recently retired associate pastor who had served for forty-five years and been married for forty of them. In both cases, there was a narrative of faithfulness and persistence, for truly having lasting marriages and a good reputation among one’s peers for being people of talent and ability with the heart of a servant and a love for the people one serves are worthwhile to notice and emulate to the best of our abilities. I was struck in particular both by the fact that our retired associate pastor had been most pleased to be seen as a teacher, especially through his writing, and that our retired senior pastor commented that the Pacific Northwest was home, after a somewhat vagabondish childhood and young adulthood. A great part of the perseverance of their lives is represented by the fact that both people were given honor by their peers, and valued for their wisdom and compassion, and that both have had loving and lasting marriages despite the difficulties and vicissitudes of life. Let us hope that they enjoy some well-earned peace in their sunset years and are able to pass on their wise counsel to others in a more informal mentoring kind of role.

Although these two stories are different, there is much that can be learned about perseverance from both of them. Some people’s lives are spent in remoteness, and their persistence involves the desire for them to stay connected with others, despite the distance and time and effort that is required for communication and interaction with others. Such people may face, as the Zambian brethren have, a great difficulty in demonstrating their character and heroic efforts may be necessary for their intents and purposes to be seen, but their faith and their loving community no doubt meant much in encouraging them along their path. Likewise, among the most difficult problems that pastors face is not researching and giving messages, but rather in resolving conflicts and in preserving the context of respect and communication that are necessary for lasting careers and lasting relationships. Given the difficulties many of us have with such matters, such success is admirable and enviable. To be sure, such success was not individual success, both the brethren in the remote Zambian village and the two ministerial couples being honored were part of, and honored parts of, larger communities, but that is the point. The perseverance of individual saints depends on their being a part of something greater than themselves, developing the skills that are necessary to love and respect other people, and being loved and respected themselves by others.

Although the perseverance that may be required of us differs from one person and one situation to another, there are a few common elements to that perseverance that are noteworthy. For one, it requires a great deal of individual intestinal fortitude to endure the changes, or lack of change, that situations require. Everyone has their own burdens to bear, and not all of them are the same, yet all of them require persistence in some fashion, even the persistence to be loving and kind when others are not, or to live honorably when treated dishonorably. Yet to do this effectively over the course of years and decades requires both that we be connected with God, to give us the strength that we do not possess within ourselves alone, and also to have strong relationships with other people, who are able to provide us with perspective that we lack on our own. So too we ought to provide wise counsel and perspective for others as well. Lasting faith and perseverance are not accidental matters; they require intent and deliberate action. They also require a context to fit into. Let us therefore do what is necessary so that we and our relationships may endure.