Scripture Daily

Context No. 1397 of 4322 · Nehemiah

Context · Reflection

Nehemiah 9:21-25: in context

21“Yes, forty years you sustained them in the wilderness. They lacked nothing. Their clothes didn’t grow old, and their feet didn’t swell. 22Moreover you gave them kingdoms and peoples, which you allotted according to their portions. So they possessed the land of Sihon, even the land of the king of Heshbon, and the land of Og king of Bashan. 23You also multiplied their children as the stars of the sky, and brought them into the land concerning which you said to their fathers that they should go in to possess it. 24“So the children went in and possessed the land; and you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and gave them into their hands, with their kings and the peoples of the land, that they might do with them as they pleased. 25They took fortified cities and a rich land, and possessed houses full of all good things, cisterns dug out, vineyards, olive groves, and fruit trees in abundance. So they ate, were filled, became fat, and delighted themselves in your great goodness.

In the great prayer of confession the Levites lead, they recount God's faithfulness to Israel in the wilderness and beyond. Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness, they pray, and they lacked nothing; their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell. You gave them kingdoms and peoples, multiplied their children like the stars, and brought them into the land you had promised. They took fortified cities and a rich land, houses full of good things, wells, vineyards, and olive groves; and they ate and were filled and grew fat, delighting themselves in your great goodness.

Among the grand strokes of this remembered history, the sustaining of a nation and the gift of a land, there is a small and tender detail worth pausing on: their clothes did not wear out, and their feet did not swell. For forty years in a wilderness, God's care extended even to their clothing and their feet, the small, continuous, unglamorous needs of daily life over a very long time. It is easy to think of God's provision only in its dramatic forms, the parted sea, the manna, the water from rock, and to overlook that the same care was at work in the quiet, ongoing sustaining, day after day, decade after decade, down to whether their sandals held and their feet held up. God's faithfulness is not only in the great deliverances but in the small, steady provision that keeps a life going through the long, unremarkable stretches. And the Levites make a point of remembering it, naming even the clothes and the feet in their prayer, because remembering God's faithfulness in the details is part of how faith is sustained. We tend to remember the crises God brought us through and forget the ten thousand ordinary days he quietly carried us. To recount his faithfulness rightly is to notice not only the dramatic rescues but the clothes that did not wear out, the daily, small, continuous care that held our lives together when nothing spectacular was happening.

Do I remember God's faithfulness only in the dramatic rescues, and overlook the small, continuous care that has carried me through the long ordinary stretches, the daily provision as quiet and constant as clothes that do not wear out?

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