The Patriarch

continued

Hell a tiny, insignificant place even in comparison with earth! And earth infinitesimally small, set beside heaven ...

“Let us not look back upon the world and fancy we have given up great things,” wrote a man who in the third century gave away an earthly fortune to live in a desert cave.

Born in AD 251 to wealth Christian parents, Antony of Egypt was twenty years old when in church one day he heard a reading from the Gospel of Mark. “Go,” Mark records Jesus saying to another rich young man, “sell what you have and give to the poor... and come, follow me” (Mark 10:21 RSV). Antony took the command personally. For the rest of his life – he lived to be a hundred and five! - he devoted himself to prayer, fasting, and self-denial.

And to his remote cave came everyone from peasants to Emperor Constantine himself, seeking his wisdom for their worldly problems. How did Antony understand this world we're in so well? Because he looked at it from the standpoint of an infinitely greater one.

“For the whole of earth,” he said, “is a very little thing compared with the whole of heaven.”

My life is but a weaving between my God and me,
I do not choose the colors He works so steadily.
Oft' times He works in sorrow, and I in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper, and I the underside.

Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why
The dark threads are as needful in the Weaver's skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.
                   On a card distributed at the Corrie ten Boom House
                                      Haarlem, the Netherlands

Antony looked at earth from a larger perspective.

In her suitcase, Corrie ten Boom carried a little piece of handcraft to illustrate the two different viewpoints. It was a scrap of cloth, embroidered with multicolored threads - red, purple, black, metallic gold. Displaying it before an audience, she would explain that it represented the glorious life awaiting us in the next world. Puzzled faces would look back at her. The cloth showed only an untidy tangle of snarls and loose threads.

"Oh, I forgot!" Corrie would exclaim. "You're seeing it from the wrong side!"

Turning the cloth around, she'd hold it up again. From "heaven's side" it revealed a magnificent crown, the design God was weaving for eternity with the seemingly mismatched threads of an earthly lifetime.

I first saw this little visual aid as Corrie was unpacking her bags at our house. Thirteen-year-old Liz had given Corrie her bedroom, and she and I were helping Corrie put things away. The cloth, folded wrong side out, was at the bottom of the suitcase.

"What are you making, Tante Corrie?" Liz asked eagerly. Unlike her all-thumbs mother, Liz enjoys handwork.

"Oh, that's not mine," Corrie said, picking it up. "That's the work of the finest weaver there is."

I probably looked as dubious as Liz did. “I suppose it would be neater,” Corrie admitted, “if we undid the snarls. But then…" with a flourish she unfolded the cloth, “God’s beautiful picture wouldn’t hold together.”

Earth’s side, heaven’s side. Different views of the same material.