July 21 | Moments Almanac | Finishing

Welcome to Moments Almanac. It's a time for us to remember the people, places, and events that leave fingerprints on the soul. Today is July 23rd, and on this day in 1742, in a small room above a Methodist meeting house in London, a 73-year-old widow named Susanna Wesley took her final breath with her son John at her side. She had buried her husband and ten of her nineteen children. Yet she left behind sons who would ignite a movement that reshaped the English speaking world. Susanna never preached a sermon or published a theological work, but she taught her children scripture with a discipline so faithful that many historians have called her the true founder of Methodism. Her convictions cost her dearly. For nearly a year she and her husband Samuel lived as almost strangers under the same roof because she would not say amen to a prayer for a king she believed had no rightful claim to the English throne. She would not pretend agreement simply to keep the peace. Years later, her son Charles would write words that seemed to capture the spirit of the home she had built. A charge to keep, I have, a God to glorify. Now let's move ahead 143 years. July 23rd, 1885, in a quiet cottage in New York's Adirondike Mountains, another life was coming to its close. Ulysses S. Grant. The general who accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender and later served two terms as president lay dying of throat cancer. He knew his family would soon have nothing. So, at the urging of his friend Mark Twain, Grant spent his final strength writing his memoirs. Every page was a race against death. He finished the manuscript only days before he died. The book became one of the great publishing successes of the 19th century, providing for his widow for the rest of her life. Two very different lives, a widow in a London garret and a general in a mountain cottage, but the same shape of faithfulness. Finish the charge you have been given, whatever it cost. Susanna's charge was to raise children in the fear of God when no one of consequence was watching or nothing about her days appeared remarkable. Grant's charge, in the end, was simpler than any battle he had ever fought. Provide for those who depended on him, even from a deathbed. Neither lived to see the full harvest. Susanna never saw Methodism circle the globe. Grant never held a single royalty check from the book that would secure his family's future. Near the end of his life, the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. He wasn't claiming a perfect life. He was claiming a finished one. And that distinction, it really matters. Susanna was no saint. She argued fiercely with her husband and buried more children than most of us can imagine. Grant was no saint either. He struggled with alcohol for years, and left the presidency shadowed by the failures of men he had trusted too easily. But on july twenty third, in two different centuries, each of them kept the charge before them until there was no more strength left to give. As Charles Wesley would later write, to serve the present age, my calling to fulfill. Perhaps that's a lesson of this day, not perfection, faithfulness. And that's my prayer for me, and that's my prayer for you today. Sometimes it seems like we are all perpetually racing against our flaws, and yet there is grace. But my prayer for myself and my prayer for you is that you will take what God has entrusted you today and run. No matter how small the mission, no matter how small the task, it's worth it. And that's Moments Almanac for July twenty third. I hope you'll join me tomorrow. Until then, take care. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.