Although it was celebrated a couple of months ago, the Jewish feast of Succoth is worth thinking about. For it remembers and acknowledges God's care:  the abundant rhythms of the harvest and the flow of the natural world. Even in the desert wilderness of the Negev, a desolate land hundreds of miles from any city or town, Yahweh demonstrated his concern for the Hebrew people.  Though he could seem frightening, God provided food and shelter for his traveling people.

    Many of us do not need to worry about where we will get our next meal.  But billions of people do.  And these same billions are heavily dependent on the inevitability of the world's rhythms; they count on the ability of the land to provide for them, year after year after year.

    And usually the land does.  Now we do not know precisely how God works in the world, nor do we know exactly how he moves in the natural processes he set into motion, if he even does.  But we do know that as long as we take care of it, the world will take care of us.

    To this, regardless of how we understand God's relationship with the world, we can certainly acknowledge that the world is not random.  It is a place of order and design.  It is a place of grace.

    We are such contingent beings.