Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr of Smyrna, 156

Great peace have they who love your law, 

for them 

there is no stumbling block.  

Psalm 119:165

Even though, as my friend Earl used to say, “Shit happens. A LOT.”  And it sure does.  It doesn’t mean that all is hunkey dorey There’s a famine and Naomi, her  husband and 2 sons go to Moab to survive. There her sons marry and then her husband and both sons die. She says to her daughters-in-law “Call me not longer Naomi, but Mara (meaning bitter) for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.” (Ruth 1:20) She urges her 2 daughters-in-law to return to their father’s house, which makes sense, and Orpah does, but Ruth refuses to leave, saying  “Where you go, I will go, where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, your God will be my God, Where you die I will die...” And so,  Naomi “said no more to her” and they continued on together to Naomi’s  own country where they glean the left-overs of the wheat harvest to stay alive. Instead of giving up in despair they “keep on keeping on” as recovery folk would say. 


Then there is Polycarp, an old man  whom I love. At the end of his long life,  he is asked to curse Christ or die. Polycarp makes the amazing reply: “Eighty-six years have I served him, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”  


“Great peace have they who love your law...”