Psalm 139

1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.

5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

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

13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake, I am still with you.

19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!
20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD,
and abhor those who rise up against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

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At times in my life I have looked back introspectively and wondered why I am as I am, and a variety of seemingly significant events come to mind. Some I don’t actually remember as they happened when I was too small to recall any details, but they were told to me by my family who did find them to be important markers in my life, or in the life of my family.

One such time occurred not long after another brother was born, myself just 13 months old back then. The new baby arrived and still just a baby myself, I became ill and needed to be hospitalized for a period. It was back in the days when mothers had to leave their babies at the door and walk away, not expected to return until the child was recovered and ready for discharge. Visits were considered far too upsetting, and there was no suggestion that anyone to whom the child had some emotional attachment might be allowed to stay and sleep there with the small patient. Little children, not understanding their abandonment, went through a cycle of profound grief. When mothers returned to collect them later, there were often behavioural repercussions resulting from such a trauma. I heard that this happened to me, and for a long time afterwards, having already been displaced by another baby anyway, I apparently remained detached, grabbing and holding food in both hands, refusing to be comforted, and retreating into myself. Not a great beginning to early family life! I know I “got over it” eventually, but it shaped me in ways I have recognized since. When it comes to pain and loss, for a long time I would go inside and tend to myself, not always in the best (despite their creativity!) ways.

All of us can usually find significant events throughout childhood and adolesence that have affected us in different ways, some for the better, others for the worst. Without disclosing any more specifics in my own life, I can say that there were some quite serious incidences with effects that have caused very messy and unhappy outcomes. I have the scars, both emotional and physical, from some very dark, dreadful and peculiar times and places. Their durations were prolonged, too crushing to speak of aloud, and became haunting demons in my mind.

As a teenager, reading and writing the usual kind of poetry full of teenage angst, I came across a few lines that, for the life of me now, I cannot remember who wrote nor exactly how they went. But the message of them was something along the lines that it was indeed risky to reveal who I was to anyone as they may not like (or love) me and it was all that I am (have or was). Scary stuff, especially when already sporting a fracture of basic trust that is the first psychological milestone to be achieved in infancy according to the likes of Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson. Who could I let come to know me, really know me, who would truly understand me - and dare I even imagine it, actually love me with the profound love I would really like? And don’t so many of us have this same yearning, at least to some degree or another?

Enter my life… Psalm 139.

At first it was really just words, kind of nice ones, but also something of an invasion of privacy. What? Know my every thought? Oh my goodness! You mean I can’t even close the bathroom door to keep Him out? Yikes! I’m not sure I’m really too comfortable about that!

But the words also had that fateful property of drawing me into them. Oh how I wanted to really be known if it meant becoming His beloved child, completely understood, totally seen, and nothing of me withheld from His sight. Too bad about the bathroom door - that too. Absolutely everything seen and known about me, if He would only wrap His arms around me, hold me and breathe into me those tender words of the lover… I love you.

One night recently I awoke very suddenly and sat bolt upright in bed. It had penetrated my sleep, so powerfully had come the realization that the message of Psalm 139 fitted exactly what I had been searching for as a child and teenager. It was the full emotional impact that I awoke with, and it was incredible. Perhaps it sounds rather daft, reading it as I have written it here, but this was one of those astounding moments of going from blindness to suddenly seeing, a revelation and a reality rather than merely a hope. That night there was an experience of healing whereby certain things in the past met with their antidote and faded to a place where they now barely exist. I know of them, but that is all. They have lost their colours, their effects, their significance. What my own efforts sought to do but never achieved, God has done for me instead - fulfilled the God-shaped need they, in their distorted attempts, never could. Praise be to Him, true lover of my soul.