I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for Him; in His word is my hope. My
soul waits for the LORD, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen
for the morning. Psalm 130:4
The thing about
watchmen in the night is that they never really doubt that the sun will rise.
Not really.
It might feel like it
sometimes, as they pace the rampart both to warm cold bones and to keep from
falling asleep. They might jump up and down a few times to regain feeling in
stiff joints. Certainly time moves slowly. Even without a watch or cell phone, the
seconds swell into silent drops whose surface tension builds, slowly slowly,
and finally explode into the waiting puddle below. One, one thousand.
But our God is not
bound by this fourth dimension any more than the pulsing particles that wrap
their strands around our experienced existence. It too is held loosely in the
palm of His hand, much like the billions of galaxies that made Brandon and
Cameron and Rachel’s eyes sparkle last night at family dinner. So many times
the childhood Rachel would wrap up in a thick blanket and sit outside in the
night and watch brilliance spin across the sky.
Our God is mighty and
who can stand against Him?
That was the click of
the blinking red light alarm clock at 4:15 this morning. And may that be the
click of my heart today, the railway track sounds marking the seconds. Without
the static of a GE AM/FM clock radio fuzzing the clarity as I move through the
busyness of the day, beginning with stepping out into the starlit near dark with
a blue towel draped around my shoulders, and ending with final crunching
footsteps up the gravel driveway under the self-same stars. As I pause and look
into each pair of eyes, may my heart too sing.
Our God is mighty and
who can stand against Him?
And in Steinbeck’s The Pearl the people of the Gulf know
this: Part of the far shore disappeared into a shimmer that looked like water.
There was no certainty in seeing, no proof that what you saw was there or was
not there. And they expected all places were that way, and it was not strange
to them.
Nothing is wanting to
me. In green pastures He hath settled me.
