"Lord, Let Me Not Live to be Useless!"

If you google "John Wesley," you will find a host of different results.  There are articles, pictures, blogs (like this one), and more.  Some of them are scholarly, some are reflective, some are appreciative, and some are snarky, if not downright hateful.  (There is one website that calls him "Satanic," which really took me aback!)

One of the most popular type of Wesley sites is of the "favorite quotes" variety.  Everything from a top 100 list to a no-he-didn't-say-that list can be found online.  You'll find the usual suspects about strangely warmed hearts, about the world being his parish, and the good news that the best thing is that God is with us.  And you will almost always find some version of the one that I took the title of this post from -- "Lord, let me not live to be useless!"  It has been immortalized in stone in the churchyard of Wroot where he served as his father's curate 1727-1729, which is where this picture was taken.

Being a Wesley nerd and having studied under people like Richard Heitzenrater and Gayle Felton, I know the importance of context, so I will happily spend hours trying to trace a supposed Wesley saying back to its source.  While I am by no means an expert, and my search was anything but exhaustive given the extent of Wesley's writings, I have found two places where this quote is to be found.

Both are in his journal.  He had been preaching in Colchester and on December 22, 1763, he writes:

I spent a little time in a visit to Mr. M --, twenty years ago a zealous and useful magistrate, now a picture of human nature in disgrace -- feeble in body and mind, slow of speech and of understanding.  Lord, let me not live to be useless!

On December 8, 1764, almost exactly a year later, while in London he writes:

I saw one who many years ago was a "minister of God to us for good" in repressing the madness of the people, Sir John Ganson, who was near fifty years a magistrate and has lived more than ninety.  He is majestic in decay, having few wrinkles and not stooping at all, though just dropping into the grave, having no strength and little memory or understanding.  Well might that good man Bishop Stratford pray, "Lord, let me not live to be useless!"  And he had his desire:  he was struck with a palsy in the evening, praised God all night, and died in the morning.

My UK geography is a little shaky, but London and Colchester are approximately 68 miles apart, which is quite a distance if one is dependent on horses for transportation, and Mr. M -- is not the same name as Sir John Ganson, but I am struck by the similarities.  Both are described as long-serving magistrates who had been helpful to the Methodists and as elderly men whose old age is marked by physical and mental decline, a condition Wesley himself greatly wishes to escape.  In the first journal entry, he is himself exclaiming a fervent prayer to be spared this fate, while in the later entry, he is appreciatively quoting Bishop Stratford (about whom I know nothing) as exhorting the Almighty to grant him a quick death rather than a slow wasting away.

Harsh though his words may sound to us, it is important to understand that for the energetic John Wesley who was brought up with a Puritan expectation of redeeming every idle moment and spending every hour of every day in worship of God and in the furtherance of the gospel, the thought of not being mentally or physically capable of doing so was horrible. Life was short, and one needed to make the best use of it before it was over. This attitude was instilled in him from an early age, probably from both parents, as was the notion of having to give God in the life to come an account of how one had used the time given.  In her private journal, Susanna Wesley writes:

'Tis perhaps one of the most difficult things in the world to preserve a devout and serious temper of mind in the midst of much worldly business ...; we must work so much harder, we must be careful to redeem time from sleep, eating, dressing, unnecessary visits, and trifling conversation, that we be not forced to contract our private devotions into such a little space as may deprive us of the benefit and comforts of them.

It was a lesson learned well by both John and Charles Wesley.  Surely the urgency of being about the business of ministry lay behind this hymn -- 

A charge to keep I have,

A God to glorify,

A never-dying soul to save,

And fit it for the sky.

To serve the present age,

My calling to fulfill:

Oh, may it all my pow’rs engage

To do my Master’s will!

Arm me with jealous care,

As in Thy sight to live;

And O Thy servant, Lord, prepare

A strict account to give!

Help me to watch and pray,

And on Thyself rely,

Assured, if I my trust betray,

I shall forever die.

So then, for the Wesleys, and hopefully for us, being "useless" is different from spending quiet time with God, renewing and re-creating;  it is careless disposal of the moments that make up our lives without noticing that we are even doing so. In that sense, I must honestly confess that I am sometimes quite useless, that I am often what Wesley disparagingly called a "trifler."  I often fritter and waste time on Facebook or watching TV; I spend time gossiping, complaining, planning what I will eat or wear, letting minutes and even hours slip through my fingers that would be better spent in prayer and reflection, in reading scripture and applying it to daily life.  

Perhaps you are guilty of the same.  What would it take for me, for you, to re-center ourselves on Christ?  How long would it take for us to develop habits of holiness that do indeed "redeem" our time?  And are we earnestly striving after it?

Lord, let ME not live to be useless!