The Distilling

On a whim in 2001, my mother and I drove late into the night to West Virginia, to a little old house on a lake that once belonged to her grandparents.

She loves genealogy, and we spent the weekend exploring cemeteries and old home sites in hollers left empty by time and progress.

In Pax, West Virginia, we stumbled upon the farm that had belonged to mom’s great-grandparents. All that was left were the chestnut trees and the old cellar.

I walked down into that stone cellar with the weight of four generations on my shoulders. The shelves were cobwebbed, and the musty air smelled of moss and time.

There, on an ancient wooden shelf, there were jars of pickles. Lovingly packed, these cucumbers had been meant to last a year, but they had lasted fifty. Besides them, there were only old, wire rug beaters and a dead mouse.

Those hills were known for their stills in the prohibition days, but I thought about the distilling of time as I climbed the stone stairs up from darkness into daylight. Isn’t it funny what rises to the top and lasts through eons?

God decided what parts of His story would last through the ages by inspiring Moses to write a song.

“This song will be a witness for Me… it shall confront them as a witness (for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring),” God told Moses.

Moses sat down and wrote the song. One of his opening lines says, “May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew…”

Moses recounted the sorry state of slavery in which God had found His people, the remarkable exodus He worked, the future rebellion and betrayal the people would enact, and finally, the redemptive work of His compassion “when He sees that their power is gone.”

It is a Gospel song, and it trickled down through the generations, using time as the still, distilling the truth of Who He is from all the daily comings and goings, backings and forthings of His people.

Obviously, the Lord does this distilling on the cosmic and national levels, crossing time and space and distance, but He does it also in our limited spheres, through our experiences and memories.

When we walk through something emotionally difficult and trying, or experience the elation of triumph and joy, our emotions cloud our perception of reality and truth. Over time, however, the Lord distills the experience through His Word and His work, helping us to know Him more deeply.

That is exactly the heart of oft-quoted Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” This doesn’t mean that everything we go through is good, rather that He is able to distill the good out of it.

Joseph knew this, even in his enslavement in Egypt. David knew it as he penned his great repentance Psalm. Jesus knew it as He hung on the cross.

The late, great Poet Wendell Berry knew it too, writing in his poem, How to Be a Poet, “For patience joins time to eternity.”

The distilling process seems long and tedious to those plagued with grief, unanswered questions, or unfulfilled longing, but when we allow the Lord to cultivate the Holy Spirit fruit of patience in us, we begin to appreciate His work of distilling the good and preserving it for eternity, bringing us to maturation like grain once crushed and fired, now aged and ready for His consumption.