“You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head.” (Psalm 139:5 NLT)
We talked about timelines the other day: how our gracious God has a timeline of restoration for each of us individually and all of us corporately. We thought about how we gain an inch at a time and await the blanks to be filled in. I wrote about how our timeline moves us towards wholeness and if you happened to read the comments, you saw my friend, Pastor Mike, point out the difference between linear time and odyssey time.
Linear time moves forward in chronological order, systematically building day upon day, event upon event. Odyssey time isn’t nearly so neat. It includes ups and downs, twists and turns, leaps ahead and sets back. Experience is gained more reliably than ground.
In today’s text we are reminded that God goes before and behind us. It doesn’t matter whether our timeline is moving forward in measurable inches or if we are all over the map; our omnipresent God is our fore-guard and our rear-guard. He know the way and He has our back. What’s more: even though we’ve packed up the decor and turned the calendar to a new year, the promise of Christmas still stands, He is with us. Only God can be before, behind, and with us all at the precise same time, all the time. Whatever we walk into today, He’s already there. He’ll stay put until after we’ve moved on and somehow, already be in the next moment also.
“I can never escape from Your Spirit! I can never get away from Your presence! If I go up to heaven you are there; if I go down to the grave, You are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell on the farthest oceans, even there Your hand will guide me and Your strength will support me.” (Psalm 139:7-10 NLT)
O Lord, today we take solace in the fact that You are all over our situation. What comfort; Your presence behind and before but even more with. We rejoice in the truth of Immanuel all year long. May we feel Your presence acutely today. Amen.