The throughline of God's pursuit of us

Where I go, your hand will guide me;

your strength will empower me.

It’s impossible to disappear from you

or to ask the darkness to hide me,

for your presence is everywhere,

bringing light into the night.

Psalm 139: 10-11

The other day I moved my bed from one wall to the other in my bedroom. I like rearranging the furniture every so often because it changes my perspective and it calms me.

Reading the psalms each morning also calms me.

The other day it occurred to me that the psalms are part of a throughline conveying God’s pursuit of us. From the very first story of God walking with Adam and Eve among the faultless beauty of the garden of Eden, through Moses’ conversations with God on an arid mountaintop, and finally to the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What infinite patience, what determination, is conveyed through these examples.

On languid afternoons, God met Adam and Eve for easy walks and conversations not yet tinged with fear or guilt, in the sinless and perfect state in which He created the humans he longed to call friends. What hopes He must have had for us then when he offered us a perfect world and endless lives.

In Moses’ time, God’s message is relayed through pronouncements to his people. The relationship no longer an easy conversation among friends, but now the formal language of an estranged relationship. Between God and his people, who seem determined to turn their back on him at every inconvenience. Still, it is God who pursues us through the desert, caring for us when we thirst.

In the psalms we hear the words of individuals seeking a personal relationship with God. Willing to share their vulnerability, their anger, their sorrow, their hope. We see the fledgling trust in God’s willingness to engage with each of us, we no longer have to hide ourselves from the face of God.

Finally, God makes the ultimate sacrifice by coming to us in human form, skin so easily punctured, heart so easily broken. As an infant born in a rough hewn stall outfitted for farm animals. Into a family of laborers, he experienced everything a child, a teenager, a young adult, and finally a grown man would feel and see, living in our skin, hearing our voices not from afar but next to.

Here our relationship with God has come full circle. As in the garden of Eden, God walks with us. Again.

This time is different. He is not visiting us for a walk through a perfect garden. Beside a smoky campfire, he calls us to join him for a breakfast he has prepared after our long night of labor. He weeps with us over the death of a friend and brother. He heals us, mind, body, and soul, even when we have been rejected by our community.

Because He is God, this became his greatest gift to us, his willingness to not only walk with us, in our fragile skin, but then to experience in the most painful way, our greatest fear, the loss of life. But also because He is God, the lesson he wanted us to understand wasn’t about longevity, but that life’s greatest treasure is love. To love one another, to love ourselves, and most of all to love God.

That God loves us just as we are, sinful, wrong, fearful, failures is the throughline of history. God loves us and only asks that we love him in return.

When we learn to love our Creator, we can love ourselves, and love one another. From the daily practice of God’s love, we move closer to what we lost at the beginning.

I understand now why my mother grew more in love with God as she grew older. As I read the psalms each morning, I feel the same.

I cherish my faith because it makes me a better person. I am grateful to God for this gift because it is only a gift from God, I have done nothing to earn it.