Nehemiah 3

In its thirty-two verses, Nehemiah 3 lists more than seventy names.  Around half are the names of ancestors: so-and-so the son of so-and-so, which means we’re introduced to around thirty or so individuals who served as foremen or supervisors of a specific part of the overall rebuilding project.

Everyone mentioned in this chapter, everyone listed in the Book of Nehemiah, was willing to be interrupted by God.

They all, as we say today, “had lives” they were already living.  If they were going to eat, they had to farm or tend sheep and cattle.  They had taxes to pay, mortgage payments to make (see Nehemiah 5:1-5).  Rebuilding city walls was a massive task.  Don’t think of installing a stone wall in your garden but of erecting a stable structure that was likely twenty feet high and maybe several miles long, without a Lowes or Home Depot to deliver tools and materials (or send out a certified contractor to do the work for you).

To “join God in what God is doing” required a massive interruption of “normal life.”  We’re inspired, appropriately, by the commitment, energy (“Baruch, son of Zabbai, zealously repaired another section,” 3:20) and sacrifice portrayed in this chapter and throughout this book.  All of it required being interrupted … inconvenienced … put out.

What positions people like them, like us, to recognize and move into God’s interruptions of our “normal lives”?  Because if it’s GOD who’s interrupting, we should probably want to pay attention, right?

I think it begins with some pain, discomfort, unease, a nagging sense that something isn’t right, isn’t working.  Maybe it’s the pain of our own situation, maybe the pain that can come from seeing the pain of others and moving towards them in empathy and compassion.

Good leadership is needed, the kind of leadership that keeps our eyes on the Lord, not the leader.  The kind of leadership that helps us to see more than what we currently see, to see differently than how we’re seeing.  The kind of leader who sets an example of being what he or she is calling us to be and doing what he or she calls us to do.

We need hope, a deepening persuasion that things could be different, and the understanding that we have a part to play in making it so.  We need a pathway that turns our hopes into concrete actions.  And a community that is willing to learn to be interrupted, roll up sleeves, and get to work.

So God’s interruptions often follow a sequence something like this: pain→  leadership→ hope→ pathway→  community→  the work.  

What if the Virus is, among other things, an interruption that God is using?

What’s painful for us at this time?  What are our leaders saying to us—and how are we responding?  Are our hopes set on the Lord or merely on getting covid in our rearview mirrors?  How’s our community?

As we consider these questions, how might we pray?  And then what ought we to do … next