God Will Provide

These are confusing days of hard news and unfathomable changes in the economy and our daily lives. Beyond our own circles of friends and families, we each seek solace or consolation from our own favored sources; in our pastors, or our favorite writers, or Oprah or Rush or Colbert or The Onion. An occasionally smart-alecky local monthly newspaper columnist might seem an unlikely source for a quiet moment of reflection and encouragement; and indeed, your essayist doubts he has the standing or the stature to attempt to provide it. Yet unoriginal as these reflections may be, I feel somehow called to it regardless, and beg the reader to let heartfelt sincerity suffice where credentials fail.

It has been a hard month. I've seen two different family members undergo painful medical trials with slow recoveries. I've seen colleagues laid off from careers they passionately pursued for decades, and know dozens more in friends-of-friends networks. A dear friend suffered a stroke which will force her to sell her home to live with her family in another city. One elderly relative struggles as health issues sap the will to go onward. It has been a hard month.

And that's just the people I know directly. Around every corner, there's still more bad news about the economy, how Chrysler's problems will impact Kenosha. Unemployment keeps rising. Friends and families are wondering how they're going to get through this.

God will provide.

What?

God will provide. God keeps providing. Stay with it, stay faithful, and stay diligent, and God will provide.

All around, we see people taking fortune's blasts head-on, and standing a moment stunned; then, like Daffy Duck, somehow they shake the smoke and gunpowder burns from their faces, grit their teeth, and leap back into the fray, undeterred. It's amazing. We are hardly being tested to anything like the degree of our parents and grandparents, who saw years of double-digit unemployment, and breadlines, and Dust Bowl conditions. But the crisis of our age is our crisis to abide through -- the only one that counts.

Now, of course, it's easier to say this when one is relatively cushioned from the worst of today's crises. I made the transition from regular employee to consultant when my long-time employer relocated out of town a few years ago. Today, there are some lean days when self-employment looks suspiciously like self-unemployment, but there's still a spare can of beans in the cupboard. We can weather the down times for a while. So I'll cop to a certain degree of whistling in the dark, yet stand firm in believing that faith will sustain where social safety nets fail.

We are blessed beyond measure, beyond all deserving. We are not given to choose our incredible good fortune to be born in this country or to have the good parents we have. We can only choose to accept these gifts with grace, and humility, and try in some way to help one another in adversity.

These are times of outstanding generosity. While philanthropy generally is down, we still occasionally hear of food banks with increased donations, as people's own belt-tightening heightens their awareness of the needs of others. A friend in another state told me of seeing some of our old friends donate beloved family heirlooms to a church auction to help the needy. They couldn’t afford to make a donation, but felt so strongly that they needed to help out. I can picture the items in their house, and know what it took for them to part with them; but that generosity of spirit is a gift back to the spirit for the giver.

Call me Pollyanna. Surely it's naïve to believe that thinking cheerfully will make things better. The converse, though, is surely true: glum begets glum, sorrow begets sorrow. Situations occur… things happen… and we choose to rise or fall with them. It’s no surprise that our Orator in Chief took for the refrain of his Inaugural Address a phrase penned by Dorothy Fields for a Jerome Kern song: "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again." (We can also thank Dorothy Fields for such Depression-era picker-uppers as "The Way You Look Tonight" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and the pre-Crash "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby." She knew how to instill optimism. Don't you feel better just thinking of these charmers?)

Adversity invites us to test our own mettle, to find out what is best in us. This might be a good month to go back to church. Sit in the back, and slip out early if you must, but go. More even than praying for the rent or a job, pray for peace and clarity. Listen. Reach out for a feeling, quieter than a voice, that says "Go on. Try again. You've been given two good hands and two good eyes and a strong heart. Go on." Personally, I never hear it this loudly when things go easy; but when times run harder, it echoes as clear as rain on the leaves on a quiet summer morning. God will provide.