**Five Minute Friday is an initiative set up by Lisa-Jo Baker over at Surprised by Motherhood. It has now been taken over by Kate over at Heading Home. The basic premise is to take the word Kate gives and write, non-stop for 5 minutes. Then you stop and post. Read more about it here.
It’s been a little while since I took part in the Five Minute Friday challenge. Baby brain has left me struggling to write more thoughtful posts, and it’s been nice to focus on more practical ones for the time being.
But I’ve missed it.
So I’m throwing myself back in to the challenge, starting with this week’s prompt word:
Hold
GO
Psalm 139
The Inescapable God
To the leader. Of David. A Psalm.
1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
5 You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
7 Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
I come to the end—I am still with you.
…
The first time I held her was not when the doctors passed her to me. That was the moment I met her. But I had been holding her for 9 months, wrapping her in my womb and embracing her beautifully forming body. She was never a “group of cells”, a “fetus”, an “embryo” to me. She was always my baby, held together with love and mystery and wonder as much as with cells and tendons.
The first time I fed her was not when she first latched on after birth. I had been feeding her, nourishing her, helping her to grow for 9 months before that. All that she needed to grow into the strong and healthy girl she is now she received from me then, a baby already, eating and growing just as she does now.
When I hold her now, I am overwhelmed. And yet still nothing will ever compare to the closeness of holding her in my womb. That is the closest we have ever been, and probably ever will be. And I praise God for that. Because I know that she is still that close to Him. And so am I.
We do not appreciate the depth of life that is the child in the womb because we cannot always feel or see it. And we are the same with God. He is closer to us than we could ever imagine. There is nowhere we can go without Him, just as she was carried within me wherever I went.
There is nothing we can do, think, say, without Him knowing it. We are knit into the womb of God just as He knit us into our mother’s body while she nourished us through her pregnancy.
We live life in God, through God, with God. He holds us. Closer than we could ever imagine. We cannot escape His love – it is what holds us together. He lays His hand upon us and He holds us fast. And if we can be as dependent on Him as a child is on its mother in the womb, then we shall grow, nourish, thrive, as they do.
STOP
