The Long Faithfulness

We live in a culture of the dramatic gesture. The grand proposal. The viral moment. The testimony that involves a spectacular crisis and an equally spectacular rescue. These stories are real and they matter. But they are not the whole story of what faithfulness looks like.

The whole story includes the unspectacular version: the couple who have chosen each other quietly for forty years, through boredom and grief and joy and the daily friction of two different people sharing a life. The woman who has prayed for her daughter every morning for two decades, long after the dramatic moment of asking passed. The man who has served his church in the same small capacity for twenty years with no recognition and no complaint.

This is the long faithfulness. And it is, I believe, one of the most beautiful things a human being can do.

Ruth walking beside Naomi. Not in triumph but in loyalty. Not because it was exciting but because the covenant she had made was worth keeping even when everything around it had fallen apart.

Long faithfulness is love with its sleeves rolled up. It is love that has decided, and keeps deciding. And it looks, from the inside, very ordinary. From the outside — from the angle of eternity — I suspect it looks like something extraordinary.