Are you listening?

But God is our helper and shield

Psalm 115:1, 9-11 Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness! … O Israel, trust the Lord! He is your helper and your shield. O priests, descendants of Aaron, trust the Lord! He is your helper and your shield. All you who fear the Lord, trust the Lord! He is your helper and your shield.

Jeremiah 17:7-8 Blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.

After we heard Alex preach on Jeremiah 17:1-8 last Sunday, my friend Rhonda challenged me and another friend to listen for the Lord to speak personally to us through these verses.

Tuesday the sun shone bright, and the temperature soared to 34 degrees F, so I took Caleb and Talita to Riverview Park. We all ended up muddy, but that’s a story for another day.

Talita, who turned two yesterday, seems fearless. She whizzed down the biggest slides and begged four-year-old Caleb to join her. He chose a small slide instead. But at one point he yelled, “Grammy, catch me!” and launched himself from a platform above my head. Thank God, I was close enough to do so. He laughed and clambered up to do it again. And again.

What would motivate a timid, risk-averse child to do such a thing? He doesn’t see it as a risk, I realized. Justified or not, he has complete confidence that I will be there for him.

Aha.

I’m listening, Lord.

Yesterday morning I read Psalm 115. I heard God say, echoing Karis’s words from the last blog post, “You worry too much, especially about the people you love. O Debbie, trust me! I am your helper and your shield! I am their helper and their shield.”  

I looked up the Hebrew word translated “helper” in these verses. It is ezer, the same word used to describe Eve in relation to Adam in Genesis 2:18. In fact, most of the many times ezer appears in Scripture, it refers to God, the one who can protect and rescue us, the one we can trust to be there for us, the one upon whom we can cast our worries and cares, for ourselves and for others, for he cares about us (1 Peter 5:7).

Is the Father with us?
He is.

Is Christ among us?
He is.

Is the Spirit here?
He is.

This is our God.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We are his people.
We are redeemed.

…

All our problems
We send to the cross of Christ.

All our difficulties
We send to the cross of Christ.

All the devil’s works
We send to the cross of Christ.

All our hopes
We set on the risen Christ.

            (From the Eucharistic service of the Anglican Church of Kenya)