Variety: Psalm 146v5–6

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
   whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth,
   the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever Psalm 146:5–6

Every winter, millions of monarch butterflies make an extraordinary journey. Fragile as paper, weighing less than a paperclip you’d lose in a desk drawer, they travel nearly 3,000 miles from Canada to the forests of central Mexico. No maps. No guides. Astonishingly, the butterflies that arrive aren’t the ones who set out. It takes four or five generations to complete the round trip – each one somehow knowing the way.

Creation is full of small wonders. Psalm 146 invites us to look again: ‘the Lord their God who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever’. The God who set galaxies spinning is the same God who etched navigational instinct into the mind and wings of a butterfly. The psalmist draws our eyes from the vastness of creation to the detail of God’s justice: lifting up those who are bowed down, feeding the hungry, sustaining the vulnerable.

We often say, ‘the devil is in the detail’, meaning complications lurk beneath the surface. But Psalm 146 nudges us back to the older phrase: ‘God is in the detail’. The more closely we look at creation, at Scripture, and at our everyday lives, the more we discover God’s presence woven into the ordinary.

This is the Jesus Psalm 146 anticipates – the one who feeds the hungry, watches over the outsider, lifts up those who are bowed down. The Word made flesh, walking the dusty paths of his own world with justice, mercy, and love.

We, his people, are invited to join his work. Not only in dramatic moments, but in the quiet, daily ways we shape the world around us: designing systems that help society flourish, preparing food for those we love, offering wisdom in a meeting, giving a lift to someone without transport, listening – not surface polite listening, but really listening – to a colleague who’s anxious. These acts, seen or unseen, participate in God’s restoring work.

Jo Trickey