Our Little Part in ProvidenceRead Time 9 min

When I was in New York City this winter, I visited a memorial to the victims of the Irish Potato Famine. It’s in Manhattan, a few blocks from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, tucked between the skyscrapers. You enter from underneath, passing through a more traditional memorial with quotes about the horrors of the famine, before you emerge into a roofless Irish cottage, complete with a little hillside of windswept grass. The cottage was built with stones from every county of Ireland, and it is beautifully incongruous with the sleek skyline all around it.

I thought about the immigrants who arrived on ships so awful they were nicknamed “coffin ships.” The Irish who came to New York were desperate and starving, and they helped to build a city that has become — in many ways — the cultural center of the world. It sort of took my breath away. I had been walking around New York embarrassed by my own poverty — my less than chic clothes, my choices of cheap food and of sites with free admission. My poverty was nothing compared to theirs, but it gave me a window into the contrast between the circumstances of their arrival and what they built. I thought about how much it would mean to me to know that my sacrifices had contributed to something that would last and would matter. I thought about how astonished they would be at their legacy.

Most of us will never arrive as penniless refugees in a new country with no connections or plans to get us started. But we all have places of poverty in our lives: places where we are not in control, places that feel too big for us to handle, places where we ultimately have no choice but to allow God to be in charge.

Providence is a story that operates in a thousand more dimensions than we usually notice. God is working in our lives, not for our earthly wealth and stability, but for our becoming the kind of people he meant us to be. He works to make us able to love and be loved so well and so freely that we will radiate his love to everyone we meet and be ready to be with him for eternity. He is working for this for every human being, and he operates outside of time. We won’t know, this side of heaven at least, all the other threads that overlap and intersect with ours or how our smallest choices ripple out to change the world — whether for good or for evil.

And it is easy to get thrown off by the scope of it. Our good instinct to be an instrument of making the world a better place can backfire into discouragement if we start to think that righting the whole story is up to us. We know the end of the story. We know that good is ultimately victorious because God came to redeem us, not because we had any ability to fix the world on our own. Our job is to trust him enough to do the part that he gives us.

The part he gives us has to do with our actual lives. Love happens in ordinary, concrete actions, not in broad abstractions. What he asks of us usually feels both too big and too small: too small to contend with all the darkness we see in the world around us but still too big for our own small strength. In order to do something that is too big and too small, we have to push ourselves enough to rise to the task and also trust God enough to leave the big picture up to him. I think that’s part of why doing the thing that is too big and too small has a real impact on who we are and on the lives of the people we interact with day to day.

Later that night in New York, I sat in a window overlooking Union Square and watched as the steadily increasing snowfall did not halt the flow of pedestrians. I thought about how many people live on this one little island, who they are and what brought them to New York: businessmen and billionaires in massive high rises overlooking Central Park, starving artists who can barely afford their share of a miniscule apartment. What makes it worth the exorbitant fees to live in this one place?

At the most basic, overly simplified level, people come to New York because it is interesting: because things of significance — cultural or otherwise — have happened and do happen there. New York is certainly no utopia, there are problems of every kind to be found. But something about it makes it worth the effort to eight million people.

We do things that are of God when we rely on him. Maybe the poverty of the Irish was an asset in the building of something good. Maybe the building of New York City is an overly worldly example of what we are talking about: It’s not necessarily our job to build something that will last in an earthly sense. But then again, maybe that isn’t what is going on in this story. Maybe New York City is an interesting place because it reflects the people who built it. And maybe the Irish who helped to build it were interesting because they were relying on God and doing the thing he put in front of them: the thing that was both too big and too small.