Some ripe, some not

My winterizing chores include “the last rites” at of the small tomato patch on a sunny side of our garage. It’s my husband’s attempt at farming, and he pampers the soil to grow the best tomatoes he knows how. But when the nights chill in October, and the leaves start withering, I know I add “tomatoes” to my yardwork chores.  It’s too bad, as some of our biggest tomatoes are struggling to redden, and there are dozens of tiny ones that will never make it. After I pick the “possibilities,” I feel badly about pulling up the rest.

I guess it’s my personality to offer second and third chances, hoping people will lift their hearts fully to the Sun of Righteousness, the Lord Jesus.  When that doesn’t happen, I grieve, and have to reconcile myself to an imperfect world.  Even as I pulled those tomatoes, I thought of the many still-unanswered prayers. I just don’t understand,  I mused, then halfway remembered a little-known hymn with those opening words. I’d learned of it another time of uncertainty and trial.

Searching through the indexes of several hymnals, I found it in a small hymn collection gifted to me forty years ago by classmates at then-Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland.  It was their way of thanking me for playing piano in morning worship sessions that year. Within a year and a half, both my parents would die, and that paperback hymnal become part of God’s “comfort kit” as I worked through my grief. That hymn begins:

I am not skilled to understand/What God has willed, /What God has planned, /I only know at His right hand /Is One who is my Savior.

I never gave much thought to the author of the lyrics except to surmise that this person must have also had a great sadness that they had to leave in God’s hands.  A few clicks on the computer mouse brought me to her story. The author, Dora Greenwell (1821-1882), in the language of the late 1800s, was especially concerned with “idiots” and “imbeciles.”  Today we’d call them people with severe physical, emotional and mental disabilities. She visited asylums for these people, lifted spirits of society’s “lowest,” and raised money to help them. One biographer spoke of her personality as “rippling sunshine.” 

 She was born into a wealthy family but her father’s financial troubles and death sent the family into poverty. She moved in with a brother who was a vicar and devoted herself to the less fortunate. One friend said of her, “Her life was hid in Christ in God, but it was also wonderfully transparent to all who knew her...She had a wonderful knack of making one happy in her presence.”

Frail in health, she supported herself as a writer. She wrote essays mostly about women’s education and suffrage and the slave trade, and published biographies about French priest Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire and American Quaker John Woolman. Her book The Patience of Hope was published when she was 39.  (I was 48 when my book on patience was published!) Her poetry had a style similar to that of Christina Rossetti.  In 1873 she wrote eight “Songs of Salvation,” which included “I Am Not Skilled To Understand.” Prolific Gospel musician William J. Kirkpatrick set it to music.

The last verse goes: Yes, living, dying let me bring/My strength, my solace from this spring;/That He who lives to be my King/Once died to be my Savior.

It was just the message I needed that day: to leave with Jesus the problems that only He can solve.