Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Two

2024-08-10

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’” Psalm 27:10 There are many things that are meant to be forever. There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent. Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them. Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence. As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought i...

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’”

Psalm 27:10

There are many things that are meant to be forever. There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent. Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them. Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence. As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought is entirely at odds with their permanence. Yet, we live in a world where permanence can be traded for lesser agendas and what should never have left us does.

When a parent abandons us, the immense internal conflict of their supposed permanence as held in juxtaposition against their absence rocks our world to dark places. In our desperate efforts to correlate the irreconcilable discrepancies of permanence as held against abandonment, we rationalize the loss of the parent or we work to suppress the pain by denying the loss altogether. We work to believe that this might be better anyway, or that they were going to leave sooner or later, or that they needed their space to live their lives. Yet we soon discover that no rationalization is ever big enough or convincing enough to release someone of a commitment for which there is no release.

And in the desperation of times like these we begin to realize that we’ve turned to God because He has remained permanent. It is His permanence that becomes our sure refuge. Our sense of stability arises from His stability. Our ability to somehow craft a future empty of a parent that should have been part of that crafting is centered on the fact that God is a certain part of that future as much as He is a part of the present that is shaping that future. And we have the certainty that He will never abandon us in either.

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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