“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” – Hebrews 12:1
“Well, we’ll live right on,” Nathan Coulter would often say, which sort of expressed his philosophy about working through problems and situations that arise in life, no matter what they are. His wife Hannah must have heard him say it a thousand times over the course of their many years of marriage, and surely she must have found comfort in that phrase as they experienced the ups and downs of life, as we all do.
Nathan and Hannah Coulter were people of great wisdom; fictional characters though they were, from a wonderful little novel by Wendell Berry entitled Hannah Coulter. The setting is a small village in rural Kentucky during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Yet the situations and characters in the story are as near real life as they come, so much so that reading the book feels more like history than fiction.
Nathan and Hanna Coulter were just ordinary type people of their day. Neither was well educated nor had a particularly extraordinary upbringing. They in fact were rather simple folks who struggled to raise their children, maintain a modest home, raise crops on a small farm, and keep their bills paid. Yet they were people of great wisdom as was evident in their good deeds and humility, and in how they managed to “live right on.”
It has been a number of years since I read Hannah Coulter, one of a series of novels by Wendell Berry that take place in Port William, a tiny fictional community in rural Kentucky. But given the polarizing political environment of our current times and perhaps the most contentious election any of us have ever experienced, I thought perhaps we might all benefit from a bit of Nathan’s and Hannah’s wisdom in that when we wake up Wednesday morning and after perusing the headlines, whether we are happy or sad, angry or elated, fearful or hopeful, whatever the outcome, or even if we don’t know the outcome – whatever it is, “well, we will live right on.” We will all go about doing what we do, get the kids off to school, go to work, do the laundry, and go about our lives. And that is as it should be because the greatest impact on our world does not come out of Washington anyway. It never has. Ultimately, it comes from each of us and how we live out our ordinary lives, our good deeds, humility, loving our neighbor, and loving God. “Let us [then live right on and] run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”