139

It’s Wednesday and it’s late and I wanted to be done with this already. I’m supposed to be writing about the guy who just moved to the top of my list of the biggest boneheads in all of Scripture.

I’ll get to him. But he’s going to have to wait. Seems what he has to say to me isn’t what I need to hear right now.

Instead of Judges 11, where I’m studying, a friend tells me to read Psalm 139. Asks me to look and see what I might find there.

I know 139 like the back of my hand. There’s no better place to go and roll around in the autumn leaf piles of God knowing us inside and outside and upside down.

He’s searched me. He knows me. When I sit, when I rise, when I go out, when I lie down.

He knows my thoughts before I think them, my words before I speak them.

I cannot go far enough to find myself outside of His presence.

I am fearfully, wonderfully made. Knit together by none other than the Most High.

He saw me before I was anything to see. He’s known all my days since before He made me in the place none could know.

Cherish the words as I do, 139 just seems to have about as much meaning for me today as that dolt Jephthah and his wrongheaded victory bargain.

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139 is not where I need to be.

But she asks me to read it, so I will.

I won’t find anything there. 139 isn’t where I belong today.

What will I tell her when the words do not speak to me? When I read David’s words and find nothing?

How will I explain that I just proved God wrong? That His Word can indeed return void?

I read the Psalm.

I read it a second time.

And I wonder if David added those words since the last time I read 139.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:11-12)

She speaks to me of this darkness and light. Of mercy and grace. Of Frodo and Sam.

And she sends me to 139 not to revel in the knowledge that He wove my parts together in my mother’s womb with His own two hands, even though that’s well worth the reveling.

Not to take comfort in the knowledge that I cannot stumble out of His presence, though in that there’s enormous comfort to be had.

Not even to marvel at the limitless depth and height of His own thoughts, though that’s enough to take me off my feet.

No, she knows what words will lift off the page and find their way through the dark places. She wants me to know what happens to darkness in the light of His light. She wants me to see that the darkest dark shines like the day.

Darkness shining.

Imagine that.

Not darkness fading because of His light.

Not darkness disappearing because of His luster.

Not darkness seeming less dark because of His brilliance.

Darkness shining.

The night will shine like the day.

His light doesn’t merely overcome the dark (as though that in itself is some small thing).

His light is not threatened by the dark.

His light changes the dark. Transforms it into light.

Seems she was right.

139 was exactly the place I needed to be.

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