Monday 29th June - The Loo

DAILY BYTE

“You know when I sit down and when I rise up.”

These words from Psalm 139 are delicately printed in Times New Roman font on a sheet taped to the wall opposite the toilet in the women’s loo at Stanwich Congregational Church in Greenwich, Connecticut. Several times a day when I worked there, I would leave my office and go read those words, and needless to say, they made quite an impression on me. The first time I read them, I giggled. The second time, I still giggled. The third time, I thought to myself, my word – what does it actually mean that God is with me every single time I sit down and rise up?

What does it truly mean for our lives that in every movement we have ever made or will ever make, every thought we have ever thought or will ever think, God is there, knowing everything and understanding everything, whether we happen to be thinking about God, or we’re thinking about the five thousand things we need to be doing that day.

We tend to focus a lot in Christianity on the power of God to know the future, but God’s knowledge of the future is not all that’s important to us. God exists outside of human time so that God knows the future but also the past, and God exists in our present! It is hard to comprehend, but as you read last week, God knows everything about us. Even the skeletons in our closets - the things inside of us that we cringe to admit.

God even knows the things that we don’t know or haven’t been able to recognize about ourselves. If you’re thinking that this sounds a little scary, you’re probably right. This may be both the scariest and most wonderful concept known to us today and to the people of God throughout history. Psalm 139 expresses both the scariness and the beauty in God’s knowledge of us. It’s about our relationship with God, and no relationship can exist without both parties making an effort to know who the other truly is deep down inside, through all times and places, no matter how messy they are.

So if, at this time in the hectic pace of life, relationship with God seems to be something that we can save and work on later when we’re less busy, we are severely mistaken. God is present with us in this time, and we are forced in this psalm, to confront Yahweh and for Yahweh to confront us.

It’s a difficult challenge, but the Psalm guides us through, so take the challenge to journey with it this week.

FOCUS READING

Psalm 139:1-3 (NRSV)

O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.