From prayer to advocacy to feeding the hungry, Bishop Hughes reminds us that perseverance is more than surviving hard times – it’s trusting God’s ongoing work through us to bring hope and transformation. (Time: 5:59.)
Video Transcript
This is Bishop Hughes in the Diocese of Newark. I started talking in my last post about gifts that people of faith and the faith community share with the rest of the world. At this time of year, we are starting to think about gifts. We’re making our list and figuring out how much we’re spending and when it needs to be purchased so it can get to where it needs to arrive. We’re thinking about what we’ll be doing with our time. We’re thinking about others, people that we know and that matter in our lives, and one of the gifts that we bring as people of faith and faith community, I talked about last, time was unity.
Today, I want to talk about perseverance. That perseverance is something that we learn as people of faith. We learn it through simple things – that sometimes, when you read a hard passage of the Bible, you don’t just walk away from it and toss it and say, “I’m never going to understand it” – we dig into it. We study more about it. We learn what the original words were and the language they were written in. We learn about the people that they were written for, and when we learn more about it and when we sit with it day by day, sometimes those passages that seem incredibly hard yield something that is very important for us to know and that we grow with, because we have that knowledge.
We know that we have perseverance when we pray for things, that God answers prayers. And sometimes we pray for things once, and then we don’t think about them again, and we’re surprised by the answer. But sometimes we have to pray until something happens. We just keep on praying until something changes, whether the change is within us or for us. We keep praying until something happens. We call those PUSH prayers: Pray Until Something Happens.
So with these kinds of things, with study, with PUSH prayers, with long term relationships – we know sometimes we just have to keep working at it and work through if there’s trouble, if there’s been something hard or hurtful or that happens in a relationship that we’ve got to work at that. We’ve got to ask for forgiveness. We have to forgive other people. We have to persevere through whatever that trouble is, to get to the good, to the healing, to the transformation on the other side.
Every part of our faith teaches us something about perseverance. And I love in Paul’s letters to the Romans, where he talks about suffering or affliction when things go wrong, and he says, we actually boast about things going wrong, because we know that when things go wrong, we’re going to learn about perseverance, and perseverance yields hope, and hope is where we meet with God and where God turns us and that situation into something completely different. That perseverance is part of the process of being faithful.
Perseverance is something that we are already in the process of doing right now when it comes to people who are hungry. We know that with the ending of SNAP benefits that happened on November 1. I know, personally, I was hoping that there would be reprieve that came from the administration, especially after the judge’s direction to the administration, that has only happened partially, and who knows when that will actually happen. We haven’t been sitting around waiting. Our food pantries, which we have all over our diocese – many of our churches have pantries – our food pantries have been gearing up for weeks. They are ready for this moment. And they’re not just ready for this moment, they are ready to go the distance.
We’ve been there before. It was called COVID, where people lost their jobs – and remember in New Jersey, it took almost 18 months for some people to get their first unemployment check. For whatever reason that happened, we were ready for it. We have increased food as the number of people receiving in our pantries has increased. I have to tell you that in the five years that we experienced between the start of pandemic and when we officially slipped into that place that we call post-pandemic – in those five years, the food pantries in our diocese in general, at least doubled, and many tripled, the number of people that they serve. Some have even kind of grown exponentially, serving four or five times more than they served before. So our people have been at it. It’s called perseverance.
And it’s not simply that we provide this food. We also advocate. We talk to our governor, we talk to the offices that work with food pantries. We explain to them the kind of help that we’re providing, but the help that we also need to make sure that people are eating and not worried about receiving food. We also are caring for the people that are in line to receive food. We’re there to pray with them. We’re there to talk with them. We’re there to remember their name. We’re there to assure them that what happened to them, it could happen to anyone and they didn’t do anything wrong. When they lost their job, they were downsized, or they lost their benefits through something that was not their fault at all. This is perseverance.
And here’s the thing about perseverance, is it reminds you of how strong you are. How strong God made you in the first place. And it reminds you that God is always doing work through you and through other people, and that in all that we do, God gives hope – not just to us, but to the people that we serve.
So remember this, this energetic desire that we have to serve God’s people in this way, this is all about perseverance, which is a gift from God that leads only to more gifts. So as this unfolds and continues, know this: We know how to persevere.
