Psalm 139 is an amazing Psalm of David, a declaration of God’s all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful presence! God, who in one moment breathed life into things that had previously never existed, knows us. He is with us and His great gift is in allowing us to know Him! Yet often in those secret and shameful things we believe we can hide from Him. In our time of greatest need, as we are withering and dying in the sin of abortion and its effects or the wounds of sexual abuse, we believe the lie that we not only CAN hide from God, but that we need to. In that hiding we come to believe that we are not known by God, that somehow He has overlooked or forgotten us.
In the passage above, from Psalm 139, all of the words that have to do with our creation involve an active participation in the forming and shaping with purpose, the object of creation, US. In the creation account of Genesis, God spoke creation into being. In the creation of each of us, He was actively involved, a very hands on Creator. He is engaged and personally involved in, not only, our initial creation, but also in the purpose and the fashioning of each and every one of our days. Our very personal Creator became involved with us and aware of us before we breathed our first breath, and He continues in that awareness and desire for involvement with us beyond our last one.
During my journey this was such an amazing thing to me. I believed for so long that if I didn’t acknowledge my sin to God and didn’t share my pain with Him, then I could successfully hide it from Him. As I pondered these scriptures in Psalm 139, I was reminded of the feelings I felt for my children as I carried them within me. I remembered the questions my husband and I would wonder out loud about each of our children, the hopes and dreams we had for them before they were ever born.
This led me to wonder if God, my heavenly Father, also spoke of His hopes and dreams and plans for my life as I was growing in my mother’s womb. As He put his hands to the work of forming, not only, my physical body, but the purposes of each and every moment of my life, did He whisper his hopes and dreams to my newly formed ears? What wisdom and desires did He wish to speak to my tiny heart as it began to beat within me?
As the Lord began to pour all of these things into my heart and spill it out onto paper, I realized He’d given me a letter much like the one I wrote for each of my children before they were born. He tucked this letter within the pages of my healing journey just as I’d tucked the letter for my children within the pages of their baby books. Each of those letters contained hopes, dreams, and prayers for children yet to be born, for children yet to experience the pain and the wounds of sin. Each of those letters came from a heart of love for the child to know that when the pain and the wounds of the sin of this world do come, that there is only One who can ease the pain, heal the wounds and redeem the sin – Jesus!
God still searches us out and calls us out of hiding today. For the women and the men who have been wounded by the sin of abortion, victims of sexual abuse, or suffocating in sexual addictions there is often such a strong belief that they too can hide from God and that He will overlook them and eventually forget them. To be forgotten by God is often far more desirable than to be found by Him. The weight of sin, guilt and shame that is endured every day erodes all hope that there can ever truly be freedom and life. But everyday on A Journey to Grace, women, men and teens are now seeing that to be found by God, to receive the greatest gift of knowing and being known by God restores hope and brings freedom and life.
He whispers to each of us now as He did when He put His hands to the task of our creation – “I can make you whole!” What did He whisper to my newly formed ears? “Look for me. I will be there. I will never leave you.”
