Deliverance into Redemption
Logan Pollock
By the word of the Lord the Heavens were made,
and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
Here in Psalm 33 we find the Psalmist drawing a contrast between the quiet, enduring beauty of the world God has created and the fragility and weakness of the little worlds we humans tend to create. The Lord frustrates the plans of the peoples. This tension between our creation and his creation is braided throughout the Psalm and reminds me of my experience during the early days of the COVID Pandemic.
Prior to COVID, I had been living in Nashville, working four jobs. Most of my working hours were split between two different restaurants. I was burnt out, overworked, and on a whim I applied to a live-in apprenticeship on a nearby organic produce farm. On the morning of March 3rd I woke up to discover two things. Firstly, I was officially offered the job on the farm, and I would need to move on site, into a renovated little bedroom in the hayloft of a barn, by May. Secondly, the restaurant where I spent most of my working hours had been obliterated overnight by a tornado.
Coincidentally, I was going to quit that day and had already made plans to stretch my other three jobs until I moved onto the farm. Gradually, though, as you might’ve been able to predict, within two weeks of the Tornado, the worsening pandemic swiftly took the rest of my work away. I had only recently returned to Nashville from graduate school, and had been slow to establish official residency, and around the same time I found out I was therefore ineligible to receive unemployment benefits, I also learned that since my first workplace had been destroyed before I had the chance to quit, I was still eligible to receive a paycheck for a few months through their corporate insurance. My last check came the day I moved onto the farm in May, the day my expenses all dropped to nearly zero.
The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. As I was preparing to move on to the farm, I saw the world come to a halt. But as I settled into my new role as apprentice-farmer, I realized that it was only our world that slowed down. God’s world was cruising right along. The buttercup still invaded the fields in the Spring. The barn swallows were still constructing their little mud baskets in the rafters of our barn. Carpenter bees were still carving their perfectly circular burrows into all of our outbuildings. The dairy cows were still making their way through our meadows, nursing their calves. The counsel of the Lord stands forever.
It became clear to me that only God could have arranged my life in such a way, to be delivered out of the chaos of the pandemic and the chaos of my own hustle into a space that was determined almost exclusively by the gradual yet unstoppable rhythms of God’s creation. It also became clear to me that I did not deserve it. I did nothing to earn or become worthy of this rescue divine touch of grace. And yet there I was. The only thing I could do was be glad in him, and trust in his holy name.
Advent is filled with these kinds of moments, moments of unexplained and undeserved inclusion into God’s plan of redemption, whose only response can be thanksgiving. An old barren couple, night-shift shepherds, a peasant virgin, and a down-and-out carpenter. Me and you.
