Taking Shelter

Psalm 91

When I was in the 5th grade, my family moved into a house in which my room shared a wall with my parents’ room. That’s when I realized my sister was scared of the dark. She is 3 years younger than me and on some nights, I would be laying in bed and could hear her the pitter patter of bare feet slapping the parquet wood floor down the hallway as she ran from her room into my parents’ room. She had taken shelter with mom and dad. That, I knew, was a safe place. No matter what terror was hiding under the bed, we knew that if you could just get to mom and dad’s room, you would be safe. Nothing could get you.

The key was getting there. When I was younger, before we moved into that house, there were times I would get scared at night of the monsters that I believed were hiding under my bed. But I rarely made it to the shelter. I was afraid the monsters were faster than me; that if they even knew I was in the bed above them, they would get me. So I often layed there, not moving, barely breathing, hiding under the covers, enduring the sweat from the heat, for hours. I wanted to reach the shelter, but rarely made it. Did you ever have moments like that when you were young?

When you get older you eventually realize that there were no monsters under the bed. They were just figments of your imagination. However, you also discover that there are real monsters lurking about in the world today. If I asked you to make a list, what would you put on it? Politicians who threaten your freedoms? Viruses? Vaccines? Ideologies? Corporations? Hollywood? Climate change? In 2020 so many people let their fears keep them from taking shelter. We saw this literally with the shutting down of churches and the demands that people made to stay at home rather than come together for corporate worship. Society had become like me as a child, too afraid to make the dash from my bed to my parents’ room for shelter. Instead, like me, they tried to “shelter in place” and hope for the best. You know how long that works? Only as long as you can tiptoe through life quiet enough to never, ever get the attention of those monsters. That’s untenable long term.

We need a real shelter. And that’s the focus of this Psalm. God is our safe space. He is the only shelter that can withstand every danger that exists. If you take shelter with God, nothing can harm you. Period. End of story. The end.