But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat. – Nehemiah 4:9

 Today's Scripture Reading (October 2, 2020): Nehemiah 4

Early American political activist Thomas Paine argued that “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” There is a cost to everything that is good and proper in our lives. Freedom needs to be defended; we need to be endlessly aware of the things that threaten to defeat it and make us captives once again. Health is something for which we need work, and part of a healthy lifestyle involves both being aware of the things that we put into our body and continuously taking time out of our busyness to stay active. Becoming wealthy does not mean making a lot of money, which is what we usually think is required. Wealth, regardless of income, is about looking out for the things in our lives that drain away our money. A friend of mine recently complained about the penny-pinching ways of his father. But the reality was that his father’s awareness of the things that could drain his wealth had made him into a millionaire, even though he had never held what most of us would consider being a well-paying, corporate job. We have the power to achieve some of the things that we want in our lives, but accomplishing and maintaining those things depends on the level of diligence that we are willing to apply to the task.

The people in Jerusalem are tired. They have been forced to work on the rebuilding of the walls of the city as well as struggling for the food required to feed their families. But they also recognized that there was an ever-present threat to the city, as well as the dreams of the people, that existed all around them. And the easy path would have been to pray for God’s protection and go to bed. After all, do we think that God not big enough to defend the city in the absence of an exhausted people?

The answer is yes, of course, God is big enough to do it all by himself, but God does not seem to work that way, at least, not often. Sometimes, when disaster sneaks up on us, God moves in a way that we just don’t see coming. All by himself, God can and has saved the day. But the more common plan is for him to work with us. If we want something good, God seems to expect us to be willing to put our effort into the project.

Either St. Augustine or St. Ignatius (we are not sure who) argued that we should “pray as though everything depended on God; act as though everything depended on you.” And our reality is that God usually meets us somewhere between the two extremes. Nehemiah seemed to understand this reality. He did not just pray or just post a guard. He called the nation to prayer, and then he asked a tired people to occupy the watchtowers, keeping watch for the enemy, and being diligent at their task of defending Jerusalem. Because anything that is valuable to us is worth all of the effort that we can put into it, and “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must … undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Nehemiah 5