God Preserve Us!

Published by mrsamydewey on January 7, 2021

I discovered this morning that I have been writing 2020 on my journal entries for a whole week! “Understandable,” you say, “It happens to people every year.”

Perhaps…but I have also written DECEMBER!!! This is a picture of how life has felt:  “Groundhog Day”…over and over, the same day, full of dishes and laundry and insoluble conflicts, like “the song that never ends”…not the Endless Hallelujah of heaven, but Shari Lewis’s Lambchop song…(Do you have an earworm now? Sorry about that.)

As if 2020 weren’t long enough, I apparently feel the need to extend it by another week! Heaven, help us! The simple act of putting on “real clothes” and shoes seems Herculean. How do I embrace the changes I need when simple maintenance is requiring more of me than I possess? I feel like I am coming apart!

Reading in Psalm 36 of the faithful love of God, I see this:

                                             You, LORD, preserve both people and animals.                                                                                        How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!                                             People take refuge in the shadow of your wings. (NIV)

I’m pretty sure that the kind of preserving God does is not like turning me into pickles or jam, but more like making an opening in the windswept, earth-quaking cliff I am desperately clinging to so that I am safe, or at least safe enough to hear His still, small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)

That has been the tough part: being at rest enough to hear Him. Elijah was not the only one who got tucked away into the mountainside for an encounter with the Creator of the Universe.

On that same mountain, Moses had asked to see God’s glory, His true essence. (Exodus 33-34) Moses did not know what he was asking! We, as finite humans, must settle for His perceivable aspects, so God grants Moses to be shaded by His hand (or His wing, if you will) and hidden in a crack in the rock until only God’s back could be seen. In His unfailing love, He protects Moses from the extent of His reality that would incinerate the man, but reveals His Name, that list of royal titles that summarize His qualities and character:

   “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

-Exodus 34:6-7 (ESV)

How thankful I am that though I may be stuck in December of last year, God is not stuck but steadfast in His faithfulness! And if He needs to turn me into pickles or jam to preserve me, so be it! It is His business HOW He does it!

Following Jesus every day in the everyday,

Christi