Psalm 34:8 – Taking Refuge

 "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!"

Psalm 34:8 (ESV)


I take refuge in Christians more than I take refuge in Christ. It's hard not to, I think all of us want to run to loving arms when we're messed up, because it's easy, and it gives us that gratification we're desperate for at times. We can end up creating more hurt when we do that. It's left me with me with scars, but I think that sets the Lord up to get a lot more accomplished in me than He would if I were living carelessly.

I'm living in a very pivotal season of my own life – a time where I make a lot of decisions and form a lot of habits that I'll carry with me during the most difficult times of my adult life. Dishonesty and betrayal lead to questions with no answers, and a breached heart searches frantically to be refilled – but it's not like I'm dying. Sure my heart might be slower to heal than I might expect, but life is filled with tragedy and loss. Humans are temporary and life is fragile. People leave, and people die. How I react to that fact when it's presented to me on a smaller scale makes a big difference in how I'll manage it on a much larger scale. How will I react when my grandparents die? How will I react when my parents die? What if my wife does something she can't reverse? What if she loses a pregnancy? What if we lose a child? How will I be strong for my family then?

It's never healthy to ruminate on those things, there's no reason to have a dress rehearsal for grief. But do we have our crisis bunker set up? Where do we plan to go once any of those things happen? The default human reaction without any mental preparation is never ideal, and it's irresponsible to let that be our only backup plan. It leads to exactly what I talked about before, running solely into the arms of other sinners. If not that, into the arms of toxic pleasures, addiction and degrading seasons of life.

At the time I'm writing this, parts of Florida (and some other places) are in the middle of getting hit hard by devastating storms. While selfishly, I'm thankful that I don't have any loved ones living there permanently at the moment, it's difficult to hear from friends about people they care about having to go through that. A lot of people are losing everything, and they don't have any choice but to seemingly watch as it gets taken away from them, while they take refuge to save anything they can, which is essentially dictated by how much they have developed a contingency plan beforehand.

What is my contingency plan? Rather, who does my contingency plan lie with? Everything, living and nonliving, screams the existence of a divine and present Creator solely through its own innate quality to disappoint whatever invests into it exclusively. Disappointment does, after all, imply that Something is capable of living up to our hopes and expectations. Or perhaps Someone capable of exceeding them to a degree that we can't comprehend.

Taking refuge sucks, too. There's not a lot that feels good about knowing that things are being destroyed, torn down around you. You're safe, and you're thankful for that, but you know that the life you live when the sun rises again is going to look so much different than the one you lived before. You might have to live without a lot of the things that made you happy before, and there's really no telling when you'll be able to find new ones to replace them. But the peace we're offered is knowing that at the very least, there's something good waiting for us.

Wait with an aching heart, with hopeful eyes that look forward, even if in an effort to shield yourself from your past. God's good. God's faithful. God's in control. Not a drop of rain will fall that wasn't considered intentionally by the Father.

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