A message from the Past: Perfect Love Casts out Fear

There is an old Quaker joke:  “Two men are sitting on a bench.  The first man feels the second man begin to tremble and shake, but this goes on for a long time and no message is delivered.  Finally the first man rises and delivers a message.  At the rise of Meeting he turns to the second man and says:  Friend, next time deliver your own damn message thy self!”   To Quaker sensitivities this is a very funny joke because it talks about both the imperative to deliver a message and the fact that we sometimes deliver a message for another.

            In the past year my Meeting had a second hour/adult Ed hour in which we were asked to share messages that we had heard at some point that “stuck with us”   Many remembered deep, meaningful, searing messages or  Covered Meetings in which all messages flowed as if one piece of music.  I too thought of messages like this, but eventually I was moved to share of a message that had stuck with me for what I thought of as a “bad” reason.

            In the Meeting I grew up in there was an elderly woman who spoke almost every Meeting at almost exactly twenty minutes after the hour.  My father who was very genuine about the injunction to only speak when moved by God was very irritated with her and would frequently in the car on the way home make negative comments about her or jokes about how “God sets his watch to her.”  That and the fact that she quoted the Bible resulted in my never taking her very seriously.

            But the message she gave over and over again was to quote one of the verses of Corinthians and to talk about how “perfect love casts out fear”.   As I shared this remembered message with my Meeting, it suddenly occurred to me that the Achilles heel of my faith life for as long as I can remember has been how being in a state of fear or anxiety about something, I “forget God”.  Suddenly as I was speaking I found myself saying:  “I now realize she was giving the message for me, and because I was too young to understand it she had to say it over and over again until I had memorized it….only to remember it 40 years later and finally receive the message.”  I sat down in tears.

            In addition to being a very amazing way to receive a message it has also taught me to make no assumptions about the validity of a message given by another.