Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The All-Satisfying Face of God

"You fill their womb with treasure; they are satisfied with children, and they leave their abundance to their infants.
As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness."
Psalm 17:14-15

My kids and I have started a new morning ritual this school year. Every day, as we make our way to their school, one of them reads a Psalm aloud. After the Psalm, there is a moment of silence and then a prayer. That quiet moment between the psalmist's prayer and our own is one of the most tangibly (and yet intangible) holy moments of my day. The Lord has spoken prayers into our hearts, and as the truck engine rattles and hums its doxology, we silently prepare our hearts to respond in kind. By May, we will have traversed our way through the streets, through the school year, and through the Psalter with our prayers for mercy, justice, and jubilation over both.

Last week, Noah read Psalm 17 for us. I have probably read this Psalm numerous times, but it took my 10-year-old son reading these verses about children for me to more deeply understand what this prayer means. It is a prayer about satisfaction.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Here Comes the Sun

"Here comes the sun.
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's alright." - George Harrison

I could never live in the state of Washington. It rains too much. Or so I've heard.

Every so often I wake up with this feeling that something is missing, like the means to get up and start the day is still tucked away somewhere under the bed covers. Eventually I slug my way over to a window and realize that I was wrong. My absent enthusiasm is not hidden under sheets but behind thick, dark clouds. It's a dank, dismal morning with no visible sunrise.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Mission

"Make a table of acacia wood - two cubits long, a cubit wide and a cubit and a half high. Overlay it with pure gold and make a gold molding around it."
Exodus 25:23-24

Honestly, it's one of those parts of the Bible that is really easy to skip over. When the Lord wants you to build something, He can be painfully explicit in the building plans: use this much of this material on this part of this thing which is to be this size - no more, no less. And so on and so forth. I realize that, tedious as it appears, this is still God's Word, so I sort of feel guilty if I skip over it. My typical solution? Speed reading.

But when I recently encountered the passage in Exodus in which God gives building instructions for His tabernacle, I wasn't bored. I was actually a little jealous.