12/20/13

12/20/13 Life, blessings and tomato seeds...

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I'm far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night— but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you. You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can't even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me! (Psalms 139:1-18 NLT)

Life, blessings and tomato seeds

Psalm 139 is all about the little things. The things that our God put into motion that make us unique. It says here that the Lord created us so wonderfully complex, and each of us is unique. One of the things that make me unique is my bottom row of teeth. They are jammed together, and right in the front, they kinda overlap, creating a pocket, which food likes to get stuck in. Right before I decided to write this, I was eating lunch with my wife and I got a tomato seed stuck in that pocket in my teeth. I have to be honest, it is annoying, and I was annoyed by it. But, as I flossed the tomato seed out of my teeth, I realized that this is what God is trying to tell me today. I may not be happy with the way that I am created, how my body looks, how straight my teeth are, how my hair is all cowlicky in the back. But God is. He created me to be just exactly like I am. He knows each and every detail of what makes me me, because He knit me together in my mother's womb, and He breathed into me His breath, just as He has for every human that ever walked on the face of the earth. And I believe that it goes even deeper than that. God created us to be held together by His very Son. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is found in Colossians 1, and it looks like this:
"Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation, for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can't see— such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together." (Colossians 1:15-17 NLT)
The part of this passage that intrigues me the most is the last verse. We are created through and for Christ...and He holds us together. Perhaps our uniqueness, and our craziness, is all held together by...Christ. That is why we, as mere humans, can be so different, and yet we all have the potential of being Christ-like. God created my, even my tomato seed catching teeth, to be mold able into the image of Christ. That is what our Psalmist is praising God for. We have been wonderfully made! Go look in the mirror. You have been made to be like Christ!



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