This is the first of three meditation on the role of faith during difficult economic times. All three originally appeared in Washington Window.
By Joseph Trigg
My mother was 10 years old and my father was 12 when the stock market crashed in 1929. Just as I told my children about the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War, my parents told me about the Great Depression and World War II. I heard about the grandfather who lost a farm because he co-signed a note for a less provident brother, the grandfather who kept a farm because a New Deal program enabled him to pay a mortgage note just in the nick of time, a once prosperous great-grandfather who managed to pay off all his depositors in his small town bank before dying a broken man, and the year my father and his brother shared $13 between them after sweating all spring and summer to bring 10 acres of tobacco to market. Many of you have heard or could tell similar stories.
In the accounts of the Great Depression I heard growing up, people sometimes spoke about feeling helpless. More often they spoke about finding capacities for self-discipline and inventiveness they did not know they had. They spoke about how they learned the value of money, but also how they learned the value of friendship and cooperation. They would never want to go through such a time again or wish it on anyone, but they cherished their memories of it.
Their story was a story we hear again and again in the Bible, the story of finding a way through hard times and finding a better life on the other side of them. It is the story of the Wilderness and the Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, and of the Passion of Christ in the New Testament. The Bible gives us no assurance of avoiding hard times, but multiple assurances that God will be with us and help us through them. My favorite is Isaiah 43:2, echoed in the hymn How Firm a Foundation:
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and through the rivers,
they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire
you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
I have no idea whether or not we face an economic collapse as serious as the one my parents went through in their teens. It is possible that we may have to learn lessons they learned the hard way. I hope not. Bitter experience is a terrible way to learn, even if it is the most effective way for many of us. If so, I am confident that one of those lessons will be that God is with us in hard times.
The Rev. Dr. Joseph Trigg, author of Origen, is rector of Christ Church, Port Tobacco, in Charles County, Maryland.