Basking In Love

          Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will lay hold of me. If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night. Even the darkness is not dark to You, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You. (Psalm 139:7-12)

          Have you heard the old idea that young children apparently believe, that if they cannot see you, you cannot see them? There are some people in our society who seem to believe that their ideas about reality are binding on reality. If they cannot see God, God can’t see them or doesn’t even exist. It used to be that if someone believes they were someone or something they clearly could not be, they were generally consigned to an asylum. Granted, the asylums often didn’t help, but there was an understanding that reality was fixed, and that those who rejected it in favor of a personal reality we in need of help, not accommodation.

          And today’s passage deals with some of that fixed reality. God is omnipresent. There is nowhere that can contain Him, and nowhere that He is not present. He even fills Hell, though I believe His presence is not manifested there in ways that those living there would recognize or accept if they knew it.

          The key is that there is nowhere safe from Him, and nowhere unsafe without Him. This is comforting because I live in fear of making wrong decisions. It’s not that I’m a coward. I’ve made some big decisions and been confident that they were the right decisions. There have been times when I wandered in rebellion, and times when I thought I was on the right road and ended up in hell. Sometimes, I made that hell. Other times, others made it for me. God was not excluded, even when I wanted Him to be.

          As an aside, this is what irritates me when people claim that God has been kicked out of schools, or the White House, or wherever. He can no more be kicked out of those places than He can be kicked out of Heaven. I understand what they mean, but it’s still bad theology.

         Once we have given up our rebellion and put an end to our flight; once we are content to stand in His presence and turn our faces to His, like the flowers mentioned in yesterday’s entry, we can blossom and stand in His light and warmth. As noted before, there’s great freedom in that, and we don’t have to go anywhere. Wherever we are, we can bask in the love we cannot escape.