How Precious Also Are Your Thoughts to Me, O God

     As I lay down a few nights ago, I was bombarded by thoughts from 1,000 directions.  And if I choose to answer a few in one direction, it felt like I was dropping something in the other directions.
     As I was lying there, I was listening to a new jazz CD I had really been enjoying, Gary Burton's Cool Nights, and I was just lying there letting the music kind of wash over me.  And all of a sudden I started meditating on Psalm 139 and seeing it in a new light.  It says, "How precious also are Your thoughts to me [or toward me], O God!  How great is the sum of them!  If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand;  When I awake I am still with You" (Psalm 139:17-18).
     As I lay there, and the music was just kind of washing over me, I imagined I felt God's continual thoughts--toward me, to me--washing over me in the same way and lifting me just like the music, even as I lay there to go to sleep.  I love how the psalmist talks about the immensity of God's thoughts toward him while he is sleeping, and how when he wakes up he finds God still present with him.  It is as if he can put his own thoughts to rest and sleep soundly, because he knows he is surrounded by God's thoughts toward him.
     Even though our thoughts are small, God has put great thought into us.  "For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb.  I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works..." (vv. 13-14).
     And even when we have lost the ability to understand our lives, the psalmist takes comfort in this: "O Lord, You have searched me and known me.  You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off.  You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways...Where can I go from Your Spirit?...If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall fall on me,' even the night shall be light about me" (vv. 1-3, 7, 11).

"Write Every Day Down"

This post was kind of inspired by Jason Upton's song "Write Every Day Down."  It said something that I had been wanting to hear for some time.  (Here's one video of the song--I was trying to find the one where he explains it, but couldn't.)  He says, basically, that there is a message in our days, in our lives, that if we let it, can tell the story of God. 

He talks about how, somehow it was significant for the Bible to include Abraham's failures; to include the fact that the apostle Matthew was a tax collector; that Moses had been a murderer as well as a deliverer.  Those parts of the story can't be ommitted, while we choose to keep the more "comfortable" parts.  The story God is writing is bigger than our concept of it.  Our attempts at rectifying our mistakes can often be just as misguided as the mistakes themselves; and they find redemption not in our ability to "straighten it out," but in God's ability to love us in the midst of our fallenness, and somehow use it for His purposes.  I'm not talking about not repenting; but trying on our own to fix our mess is naive at best, prideful at worst, and not real repentence. 

Thanks guys!  First post, short and sweet...