A Light for My Path

A few weeks ago, I finished a devotional from The Bible app called Search Me, Know Me based on Psalm 139. The most quoted verse from this psalm is the first half of verse 14, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” But in the very first verse David acknowledges to God, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.”

The author of the devotional expanded on this verse by saying:

Before you drew your first breath, He already knew your name, your story, the particular shape your life would take. He saw what you would carry, what you would love, what would break you open, and what would build you back up.

When I put this in context of being a mother, I think about how excited I was to be pregnant, carrying that baby in my womb – not knowing if I was having a girl or a boy. And of course, I fell in love with her the moment she was born. What I did not know (and am grateful for that ignorance) was 30 ½ years later I would be broken open by her death in a car accident.

God knew that was going to happen long before neither she nor I, nor any one of the people who knew and loved her had any foresight that she would leave this world on April 11, 2017.

Sitting here nine years later, I still don’t know why God had it in the plan for our hearts to be broken. And, for a long time during those nine years, I would have sworn that my heart could never be repaired. Nothing would be able to build me back up to the strong, contented, oblivious person I was prior to the phone call that changed my life.

Nothing except that same God who knew from the beginning of time that I would be broken and would need building up. Can you reconcile yourself to that kind of god?

If I think in terms of a small-g god, my answer to that question is no. Because a small-g god is capricious. He flits around without a plan. He comes and goes. But our God – The God of the universe – who was and is and always shall be, holds me fast with His right hand (verse 10). I cannot escape His presence. And so, at some point, I stopped trying to escape. I realized that pulling away was futile. And since He already knew my anxious thoughts, my broken heart, my dark fears, I didn’t need to keep shouting them out to Him.

What I needed to do was lean in to Him. Trust Him. Let myself be hemmed in by Him. Realize that some “knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain” (v. 6). And even though it may take me the rest of my life to be fully built back up, some day I will “rise on the wings of the dawn” (v. 9) and He will “lead me in the way everlasting” (v. 24).

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Laura