Where is your safe place?
Where do you go to hide when you feel the need to hide?
To whom do you do to “lick your wounds” from life in the world?
Let’s think about these questions
as we meditate on the word of the Lord:
Psalm 71:1-6
In you, O LORD, I take refuge;
let me never be put to shame.
In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;
incline your ear to me and save me.
When we were young, we sought out the safe places, the bases from which we could move to explore our world. Even in our games, we would name a tree or a porch “home” or “base,” and as long as we were touching base, we were safe. Sometimes our cousins or siblings would get so mad that even these places weren’t safe anymore. So we would just happen to wander into Grandma’s kitchen and take a sudden interest in the making of pies. Nobody would mess with us there.
But as you get older, finding safe places becomes more difficult. Teenagers look at you like you’re a fool if you start talking about naming a locker as “home” and Grandma, if she is still alive, is no longer as amused with you hiding at her feet. “Time to grow up!” And so we try to act brave even on days when we don’t exactly feel safe.
Some of us learn the good church answer: “In you, O Lord, I take refuge!” It is a true answer; God is our shelter. As our faith matures, on most days our faith sustains us, our firm belief based on experience that God walks with us and protects us. Yet there are those other days. Days when the invisibility of God to earthly eyes make his omniscience, his omnipotence, and even his omnipresence invisible and intangible to our needy souls. Days when we call for rescue, but don’t immediately feel the strength of a divine response.
On those days we need to remember that God dwells among his people. Surely, if two or more of us are gathered together, God will be there. And God is. Yet there is a problem with this as well. Sometimes we find that our little safe place, our safe community, is not accessible to us. Perhaps they are busy; perhaps they are gone away on business. Maybe we are mad at them for some offense other than our current crisis; maybe they are angry with us. And sometimes, some of the worst times, we feel that they, our safe place, has become no longer safe.
What do we do? Hear the Psalmist:
Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress,
to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked,
from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.
For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust,
O LORD, from my youth.
Even if our eyes cannot see the rock, it is a refuge. Even if our fingers cannot feel the walls of the fortress, God is that wall about us. Wickedness will come, and not maybe. It will inflict pain, and not perhaps. Yet God will rescue us because his love is steadfast, even when the love of others, and even our own, is not.
Upon you I have leaned from my birth;
it was you who took me from my mother's womb.
My praise is continually of you.
We find comfort as a child in the arms of our parents. As an adult, we find that comfort in the arms of our spouse, or of our children. Yet after the womb, there is no constant sense of physical protection about us. We are called upon to learn to rely upon God as our all-embracing strength. We are called to venture out from our bases, our fortresses, and embrace those who need our love and care. At the same time, I think that God surrounds his children with a community to love, to touch, and embrace them so that our divinely made bodies feel and give the physical comfort of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.
Be there for each other,
Ron
