“Many times he delivered them.” – Psalm 106:43
I have concluded that for our kids, entropy is the price of creativity. The more the imaginative play, the greater the resulting level of random disorder in the house. Someone once said that the more kids you have, either the messier or the tidier you become; for us, it’s the latter. Something about keeping our space neat helps me cope with the general chaos. But that means we end up doing a lot of repetitive tidying, cleaning up the same pillows, toys, and craft supplies all day long.
It reminds me of life in general nowadays, which can feel like nothing more glorious than doing again what has been done before. Waking up to days that are all the same versions of each other, with no end in sight.
But there is something of God in choosing to do again what we’ve done before. That is the story of Psalm 106: “They did not remember… Yet he saved them… But they soon forgot… Many times he delivered them.” Again and again, the people forgot God, and again and again, God saved them. Doing again what he did before. This is what God does, and the daily, repetitive tasks we do live this out in the most granular of ways.
I like to think about all the repetitive, ordinary tasks done in the Bible: David going through the same routines to tend his sheep, Ruth bending down time and again to glean wheat under the hot sun, Jesus familiar with the same chores in his father’s carpentry shop. God did not work despite these ordinary events, but through them, to achieve his purposes. In some small but important way, they declare the character of a God whose “steadfast love endures forever!” (Psalm 106:1)
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