Better to Be Lucky Than Good
“Better to be lucky than good.”
Shannon picked up this salty proverb from a foreman during his days as laborer on a carpentry crew. It’s one we pulled out quite often during our home-remodeling years back in Chicago. Now it’s something of a daily liturgy spoken here on the farm.
We don’t just appreciate getting lucky. We rely on it. One beloved friend and neighbor, a sheep farmer of 20-plus years, says that luck is something that confirms her believe in God.
“Just when everything seems to be going wrong, it somehow always comes out right,” she affirmed in her cheery English accent the last time we were over at her hill farm in the middle of a two-sheep round-up that was stretching into an hour-long fiasco. And it did come out right. Even though the sheep had persistently gone left over the ice-encrusted incline we were chasing them on, through no altered action of ours they suddenly ran right and directly through the gate we wanted. Of course, there was then the small matter of backing our decrepit stock trailer up another icy incline to the loading door of the pen. Smart farmers plan to take animals to butcher during months that are temperate. Lucky ones get them there even when the weather is hostile.
Perhaps luck is the wrong word. The concept of “deus ex machina” is my personal favorite for this sort of happy circumstance. I first picked up the term in high school English and I’ve loved it ever since, not just for the image conjured, but because I truly believe such things happen regularly. I’ve got a farm to prove it!
According to Wikipedia, the Latin phrase literally means “god out of a machine” and describes an artificial or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot, such as an angel suddenly appearing to solve a problem (a proposition recently discussed relative to pigs). We require that kind of untangling on a regular basis.
In Greek tragedies and dramas, deus ex machina meant something more like “god on a machine,” with deities and other characters descending over the stage on wires to pluck protaganists out of danger. Kill Bill? The Matrix? Apparently the choreographers of early Greece could show Yuen Wo-ping a thing or two. Here we rely on descending deities to help us net wayward chickens from tree roosts at night and to direct stampeding cows out of the neighbor’s fields and back into our own.
At times that help has come in the form of a friend driving by just in time to pull up behind a loose horse and tail him until he turned into our drive, or as a troubled ewe waiting to give birth until we were at home and awake to assist (though we do know people who have “barn monitor” video systems to make sure they don’t miss those kind of events!).
While I am fond of the “deus ex machina” construct, especially for the slightly goofy visual and the implication of ultimate safety in a dangerous world, I’m more deeply comforted by the idea of “providence.”
Ancients understood providence to be provision from a perspective of anticipated need. The Latin word, which we borrow in English, was rooted in “providere,” which literally means to foresee. The corresponding Greek work meant “forethought.” Moderns use the term as a synonym for luck, or luck with a divine twist, but providence is a more highly developed concept in the Bible, and one of great significance to me.
The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says: “Forethought and foresight imply a future end, a goal and a definite purpose and plan for attaining that end… While all rational beings exercise a providence proportioned to their powers, yet it is only when the word is used with reference to the Divine Being who is possessed of infinite knowledge and power that it takes on its real and true significance. The doctrine of divine providence, therefore, has reference to that preservation care and government which God exercises over all things that He has created in order that they may accomplish the ends for which they were created.”
Dictionary.com simplifies the concept into “the foreseeing care and guidance of God or nature over the creatures of the earth,” which is pretty much what most of us take providence to mean. But in that simplification I miss the sense of being helped to do what you were made to do. You see, I believe, for a number of reasons, that our family was meant to steward this little farm. And I am increasingly aware that we have neither the resources or the wisdom to take care of it properly. But I have an abiding conviction that what God invites us to do, he helps us to do. I don’t think that means our labor here should be easy, or that we shouldn’t plan better and smarter, but I absolutely do believe we can expect appropriate deus-ex-machina-type rescues and re-directs, in addition to quieter, less-dramatic nudges that prompt us to make good choices.
If luck is Santa Claus – you get what you want and things work out well for you; then providence is Jesus – you get what you need to accomplish the good you were created to do. In many instances, those two things may work out to be just the same. Probably in most. In significant other instances, they won’t be, but there is the beginning of faith. Merry Christmas.
