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Psalm 31.4-5, 12-14

Take me out of the net, that they have secretly set for me *
for you are my tower of strength.
Into your hands I commend my spirit *
for you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth.
I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind *
I am as useless as a broken pot.
For I have heard the whispering of the crowd; fear is all around; *
they put their heads together against me; they plot to take my life.
But as for me, I have trusted in you, O Lord *
I have said, you are my God.

As a self-reliant person, it is hard for me to reconcile a God that created me this way for a reason, yet also wants me to find my strength and trust in him. How am I supposed to know the point at which I find my limits and God’s power begins? Or does this look more like a Venn diagram? These are confusing questions for me to consider.

One of my greatest fears is of being useless or weak. Take my calendar, for example. Before Covid, I famously wouldn’t look at a week or month in context. Rather, I tend to make commitments based on whether I am technically free at a given moment, rather than decide if I was truly that indispensable to take another thing on. Rather than try and seek God as a source of strength and discernment, I filled my calendar as if I had something to prove, and that I was in control.

Now I look at my calendar and I see monotony, if not boredom many days. The vast but temporary restrictions imposed by COVID has been a bit of an experiment in understanding what my life could be like with fewer commitments and (certainly) a lot less control. The environment I can control is perhaps contained within the same four walls, doing the same five activities, with the same people, every day. And honestly, one of those people is a toddler, so really -- I can’t control what happens within these four walls, either.

And so, 2021, with all its potential, has at least, for the moment, brought a forced moment of putting God back in His place as my source of strength and trust. It’s always been true, but the past year has really driven it home, that no one or nothing else in His world can come close to being as steadfast as He is.

¹ Corinthians 1.3-9

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Grace. Peace. Enrichment. Strength. Faithfulness. These are words that feel out of place in 2020. As an international educator, my work has been disrupted since January when we had to evacuate and relocate our study abroad programs from China, and then dismantle everything in March. Soon after I transitioned to remote work during stay-at-home orders, our daughter’s daycare closed. Two weeks later, I defended my dissertation and graduated, all on Zoom. The disparate areas of my life all came crashing down on our 1.5-bedroom apartment and I was overwhelmed and let down.

As two working parents without childcare, John and I persevered thanks to Prospect Park and some Google Calendar wizardry. In that daily grind we certainly did not feel grace and peace. Instead of faithfulness, we experienced disappointment where we had expected certainty. Yet slowing down to consider this passage, God has shown my family grace and has given us many reasons to be thankful. By His grace we have remained healthy and employed. Our family transitioned from a very hectic season directly into COVID. Where quality time was once scarce we, by God’s grace, now have time in abundance.

Likewise, once we adjusted to Zoom church, this time and “space” set apart provided an opportunity for us to be strengthened for the week ahead and to even find fellowship with Him and each other. Each of us has brought disappointments and missed milestones as the weeks stretch on. Yet because God has always transcended space, He is present even in Zoom or in small-scale outdoor meet-ups.

Our grace-filled God has always revealed spiritual gifts in His people despite imperfect circumstances. May this year be one in which we were jolted to reconsider our own traditions, expectations, and desires against what God is calling us to do.

¹ Corinthians 12:12-26

¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

¹⁴ Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. ¹⁵If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁶And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁷If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? ¹⁸But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. ¹⁹If all were a single member, where would the body be? ²⁰As it is, there are many members, yet one body. ²¹The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’²²On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; ²⁴whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, ²⁵that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. ²⁶If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.