Vision

As you leave the sanctuary at Peak Community Church, and look up, this is what you see. It’s the end of a poem by Wendell Berry called Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

Any vision worth its salt should be durable—it should last longer than a year, or five, or a generation. Ideally, a millenium.

That’s where Berry’s poem comes in. This part in the middle speaks directly to vision:

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest    
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.

A solid—no, a beautiful—vision is worth doing for a thousand years. So much good work is patient, small, slow: getting to know a neighbor, building compost, learning to pray, baking.

At Peak Community Church, we try to practice small good things: making a meal for a family sheltering in our building, praying for a coworker, getting to know a teenager, teaching a kids’ class, eating a piece of bread dipped in wine. The effect is not always immediately noticeable, but we imagine we are participating in a sequoia of faith, hope, and love.

And we look forward to one day—wonderfully, mysteriously—seeing it fully grown in a restored creation.