“He’s with me”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Psalm 61 (Forward, p. 40) CEV p. 590
In elementary school I was never much of an athlete (probably from spending too much time in detention during recess), and so, when it came to being chosen for teams, I was usually the last pick. One time, however, something different happened. The very first person to be picked for one of the teams, a splendid athlete himself, said to the captain, ‘Chose Stoney, he’s with me.” Wow. This had never happened before. And you know, I think that I actually played better than ever before.
There is a sense of this companionship, this belonging, this being ‘chosen’, in today’s psalm. Our psalmist, David, yearns to be with God, to be chosen as it were. He yearns for this intimacy, this closeness to God, not so much for the sense of belonging, but for the protection it provides—as well as he might, given his repeatedly perilous circumstances:
“Lead me to the mighty rock high above me. You are a strong tower where I am safe from my enemies” (verses 2b-3);
“Let me live with you forever and find protection under your wings, my God” (verse 4);
“Let the king have a long and healthy life. May he always rule with you, God, at his side; may your love and loyalty watch over him” (verses 6-7).
In a very real sense, this image of God’s closeness to us, and of God’s choosing of us, permeates the entire New Testament. Right away Jesus is identified as “Emmanuel’, God with us, and the gospel writer Matthew takes great pain to remind us, in Jesus’ very last words, the Jesus would be with us forever, even to the end of the world. And, according to His words in the Upper Room, He will be with us even beyond that (“I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am, there may you be also.”) And that wonderful passage in Revelation 21 tells us that God’s dwelling place is now with humankind. And, of God’s choosing of us, the Bible is equally as eloquent (‘you did not choose me, I chose you’ – John 15:16 etc.). As so that sense of belonging, of intimacy with God, of being chosen by God, runs all through the Scriptures, and is one of God’s precious promises to us. Let us, then, live in the light of that fact. Amen.
Forward notes: “I call upon you from the ends of the earth with heaviness in my heart; set me upon the rock that is higher than I” (verse 2).
“My grandfather’s house was near enough to the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield that it might as well have been the backyard. My brother and I spent hours playing in Devil’s Den, a hillside strewn with huge boulders. Every time we arrived, we would race to climb the highest rock and then run through the warren of passageways between the rocks, playing tag or hide-and-seek.
“It was only when visiting as an adult that I gave any thought to Devil’s Den as a site of battle. In and around the crevices where my brother and I played games, men had hunted and killed one another. Nearly 500 died. The nooks where I hid from my brother had to have been some soldier’s refuge in terror more than a century before.
“When praying for God to ‘set me upon the rock’ as an adult with a sometimes-heavy heart, I picture Devil’s Den’s transformation from a place of terror to a playground for light-hearted children and trust God’s ability to transform the cares and worries of the present moment.”
MOVING FORWARD: “Offer to God a situation or place that you need help in transforming.”