When I was at school, I hated playing Piggy in the Middle. I can remember making myself dizzy, spinning around in between my two friends, trying to intercept the ball. When we were young, none of my siblings ever wanted to take the middle seat in the back of our car. We were supposed to take it in turns to sit there...but my brother never would. He always stole the premier seat by the window. When we fly on an airplane, my husband rarely chooses the seat in the middle. He prefers to sit in the aisle, where there is more room for his long legs. Nobody likes being in the middle...we don't care to touch the person next to us or have our space invaded. The middle seat is the seat of inconvenience. But maybe it depends on who is sitting on either side of you.
The Psalmist knew a secret when he wrote, you hem me in. He knew the power of being able to imagine God sitting on either side of him and what a comfort, not an inconvenience that could be. And what a difference we could make in the lives of our children if we could teach them to remember that in any and every situation, God is hemming them in, on their right and their left, ahead of them and behind.
Because if God is sitting on either side of you, then that surely has to be the very best seat in the house.
Click here for a fun game to demonstrate how God hems us in.
No comments:
Post a Comment