is it supposed to be hard?

At  midweek worship, we often read the words of weighty Friends. The words are usually weighty, too, and often the writers make it sound like this business of being a Quaker is hard. Much of what they write is wisdom, and yet the words Does it really have to be that hard? often flit across my mind.

There is much in life that IS hard. There's plenty of suffering to go around, and we all have our struggles, our roadblocks, and our limitations.

Living in the Spirit, though, how can that be hard? The Spirit giveth life and truth and guidance and all good things. It is the Spirit to which I turn when I don't know what to do, and the Spirit that speaks Truth into my soul, and the Spirit that gives me more wisdom than I possess. It is the Spirit that buoys me up when I am afraid, and that strengthens me to face what I must.

Sure, I fall short all the time. I do things that would have been better undone and fail to do things that were required.

On the whole, though, I think I do a pretty good job.

I am not often a Friend who will rise and talk about what a miserable worm I am, lost in sin and darkness. (Are there still Friends who do that?) More often, my mistakes amuse me. Oh, Heather, you are so incorrigibly human! What an odd duck you are! How often do you keep needing to fall into that hole before you learn better?

I did my best to avoid accolades when I passed on that clerkly mantle. I do want to know, honestly, how people think that I served so that I can grow. The words that were spoken when accolades could no longer be avoided, however, surprised me.

My former co-Clerk talked at length about my courage in truly naming whatever we were facing.

Now, I do not consider myself particularly brave. I tend to think of the trait that my former co-Clerk described as clarity (when I am feeling good about it) or my charming habit of going for the jugular (when I am aware how uncomfortable my plain speaking makes others).

I have my father to thank for the practice of facing facts squarely. All his life, he did just that. He did his best to make an accurate assessment of every situation he faced. While my mother gave vent to her feelings, he would say, Now Dee, this is the situation. And what we must do is....

He taught me that an accurate assessment of problems carries with it the design of the solution. My life problems, no less than my programming and calculus problems, could be solved by careful attention to what I know about the situation and what I can derive from it.

My former co-Clerk called that wisdom. In my dad, it often looked like wisdom, but I think he would have said it was simple common sense. It was an economical approach to problem-solving, one that avoided a lot of wasted effort.

She also seemed to think that I was foolishly optimistic about how well those solutions would work. She didn't use the word foolishly, but I could tell. My optimism, in the face of all the ways that things can go wrong, is foolish. I believe that, if we move forward with honesty and love and tenderness and compassion, that we will get to the place that is right for us.

So if I have courage or wisdom, it is by not minding too much if I appear foolish. I don't have to worry about how things will turn out, or about whether I know enough to do this, I simply need to take the next step that is before my foot.

And that is not hard at all.