Known Part 2

 

This week you are laying down your summer homework alongside Psalm 139.  Please remember, this is not for a grade!  Please remember, even if your rectangles of places are half-drawn and your circles of people incomplete, and you haven’t even started on the starlit moments of life, God is there.  This is what the Psalmist is singing to your shy soul.  Hear the opening words of Psalm 139 again, this time from the Message paraphrase.  Read these words aloud so you can hear as if God is saying/singing/blessing you with these words:

 

God, investigate my life;
    get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
    even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
    I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say
    before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
    then up ahead and you’re there, too—
    your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful—
    I can’t take it all in!

 

I am struck by that last sentence ~ I can’t take it all in!  Even after examining and exploring the various components of my life, even after having new insights into my life, there are so many mysteries.  I sometimes feel like, rather than a masterpiece of art, my life is like Legos scattered across the carpet by a toddler.  Even though we curate and carefully construct our lives in scrapbooks or Instagram posts, behind the scenes and screenshots, there are so many emotions.  Because our minds protest and insist that everything be neat and tidy, we tend to fill in the uncertainties of life ~ our own and others' lives ~ with a false sense of confidence.  We say, “Oh I know exactly what you are feeling,” to someone who is grieving.  But everyone’s grief is different, unique as their fingerprint.  On the one hand, when you say you know how the other feels, you are trying to connect.  On the other hand, not everyone has the right to hear your opinion/thoughts.  This is holy for us to remember.  Recall from last week that powerfully challenging line from Ecclesiastes: “A time to keep silent.”  The advocates among us think, “Wait, you can’t stay silent/quiet now.  We have to say something!!  Do something!!  Get your cape because we are off to save the day.”  Notice the wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes doesn’t say that you should always, forever and forever, stay quiet or silent.  The writer didn’t say, “Just stand on the sideline and don’t speak until spoken to.”  Rather, quiet can be God’s first language.  As the mystics say, there is a reason that the words silent and listen share the same letters!!  When we are quiet, we can listen to what others are really saying, let God get a word in edgewise, maybe hear our own shy soul, and possibly enjoy the stillness without our addiction to perpetual motion.  Let the psalm above wrap around you, hold you, and remind you that God loves all of you.  Full stop.  Period.  Amen.