Here is an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s poem “A Vision”:
a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows.
The labor of well-informed preparation naturally yields life-giving spaces. Berry ends his poem: “This is no paradisal dream. / Its hardship is its possibility.”
Berry’s vision of a wisely stewarded earth is so beautiful, I couldn’t help but wonder what Abram saw while God spoke to him in his dreams about a land for his descendants, even while much of what God told him was of hardship:
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. (Genesis 15:12-16)
These details of what would unfold, however difficult to hear, might have helped Abram see the reality of this future.
“[A] man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” is how the one who would rise from the dead and ascend to heaven in glory is described in the book of Isaiah (53:3). The ways this theme resurfaces time and again in God’s word is worth our meditation.