“Woven IN love FOR love”

We have been hearing from Psalm 139 about being Fearfully and Wonderfully made… and that we are woven in love for love. We have not read the beginning of the Psalm which may be one of scripture’s greatest testimonies of the steadfast love and presence of God:

“You search out my path and my lying down, are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings for the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

We have all experienced despair… and we have all watched someone we love go through it. Despair is a futile sense that there is nothing we can do, that there is no meaning, no hope, no tomorrow. And if tomorrow comes – the sun is not coming out with it… we might call such despair being “cut off from God” whose fabric is all the realities we can longer feel: love, hope, and worth. In despair one cannot find love… can now wrestle the way to hope… cannot be valued… because we are cut off from it and any reality they may is lost to us as we are lost to them.

“You search out my path…”

We do not come to worship to find God. We might say that sometimes… but God was never lost.
We are lost… and we are cut off from the reality of God and all that is good both around us and also within us. And the good news is not that God redeems us by making us good again… but that God’s redemption finds us to show us that we were always good, and of worth, and loved, and woven in grace and hope.

God the patient and persistent reality of love… waiting, inviting, and weaving itself around you – around us… hoping against despair that we will feel it and know it deep down into our bones. And when we cannot? God just keeps on keeping on: loving, inviting, sitting, caring, trying, hoping against despair and knowing that in whatever moment a trickle of all that breaks through enough that our eyes can see, or our hearts can feel: God will be there.

I hope this day that you know: you are loved.
I hope this day that you too can patiently hope against despair and love the world and all that is in it.