On Providence

Today my feet were cold. Which was my own stupid fault: I'd elected to wear flipflops on a forty degree day. But it's been winter much too long, and I'm tired of wearing my winter clothes and my winter skin and my winter mood. The sun was out, so, in a fit of misguided hopefulness, I put on sandals and went about my business with very cold feet.

As I scuffed across campus on my way to class, I happened to look down. A pair of neatly rolled tube socks were laying smack in the middle of the sidewalk. I didn't stop and pick them up and put them on. But I did laugh out loud like a crazy woman.

In church on Sunday, we read a portion of Christ's "Sermon on the Mount," found in the Gospel of Matthew:

Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

This passage has always annoyed the crap out of me. Really. I just want to pick up a slingshot and go after those smug, self-satisfied little birdies. Birds don't reap or sow--or make big student loan payments or struggle with their career aspirations or google their medical symptoms obsessively. All they do is fly around and poop on windshields.

Trusting God doesn't come easily for me. I lie awake in my bed and gnaw my lips and run over worst case scenarios. I take baths and go for long runs and try to pray. But, mostly, I worry.

In the strangest moments, though, come these flashes of faith, these small acts of grace. I sigh over my cold feet and see a pair of socks and am struck by the incalcuable scandal that just maybe I'm cared for beyond my reckoning and that on days when I go out with my chin stuck out against the world I'm held small and secure in the palm of a great hand. And that knowledge is a giddy as the promise of spring.