Carried

"Praise the Lord; praise God our savior! For each day he carries us in his arms." (Psalm 68:19)

I love the picture that the psalmist paints for us--"He carries us in his arms".  When I was a little boy, I loved to be carried in the arms of my mom or my dad.  As I got older (and bigger), the blessing of being carried became infrequent.  Even then, I would climb up in the lap of my mom or dad as often as I could.  It just felt good to be carried and supported by a parent.

Rich Mullins was a brilliant song writer who penned great songs like, "Awesome God", and "Sing Your Praise to the Lord".  Not unlike most biblical characters, his usefulness to God harmonized a life-melody of brokenness and pain.  Listen as Rich reflects on the death of Moses.

“I am thinking now of old Moses sitting on a mountain - sitting with God - looking across the Jordan into the Promised Land. I am thinking of the lump in his throat, that weary ache in his heart, that nearly bitter longing sweetened by the company of God...

And then God - the great eternal God - takes Moses' thin-worn, thread-bare little body into His hands - hands into whose hollows you could pour the oceans of the world, hands whose breadth marked off the heavens - and with these enormous and enormously gentle hands, God folds Moses' pale lifeless arms across his chest for burial.

I don't know if God wept at Moses' funeral. I don't know if He cried when He killed the first of His creatures to take its skins to clothe this man's earliest ancestors. I don't know who will bury me -

...Of God, on whose breast old Moses lays his head like John the Beloved would lay his on the Christ's. And God sits there quietly with Moses - for Moses - and lets His little man cry out his last moments of life.

But I look back over the events of my life and see the hands that carried Moses to his grave lifting me out of mine. In remembering I go back to these places where God met me and I meet Him again and I lay my head on His breast, and He shows me the land beyond the Jordan and I suck into my lungs the fragrance of His breath, the power of His presence.”

Today, like Moses, and like Rich, I want to, "lay my head on His breast" and "suck into my lungs the fragrance of His breath, the power of His presence".  I'm so glad that God carries us in His arms.