This morning’s Wall Street Journal shows an aerial view of Hurricane Idalia over the Gulf of Mexico. By now it has made its devastating landfall. Dear God, be with the people in danger. Today’s New York Times runs this headline: “Homes Lost, Maui Struggles to Save Its Schools. Dear God, how will those victims be sustained in these long months and years? Where are You in their lives?
“This is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith” (1 John 5:4). God is with us in the moment, whatever might happen around us. “It is the world of space that communicates to us the sense for temporality. Time, that which is beyond and independent of space, is everlasting; it is the world of space which is perishing” (Abraham Heschel). The physical things of life don’t last. Sunshine gives way to storms. This old house needs repairs. Our bodies wear down. “Change and decay in all around I see…”
“O Thou who changest not, abide with me.” Whatever’s happening in the physical world around me, sometimes the world against me, whatever’s happening with my physical body, maybe illness and age, God and the Spirit of the Suffering Servant is with me. Look for God in time, not in space. “My times are in Thy hand” (Psalm 31:15). “I am with you” (Matthew 28:20). “For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8).
It stuns me how deceived we are in so many things. Time is not a thing, as we like to think. “I’m running out of time.” No, time is my relationship with God my Father and Jesus. That will never run out. No storm or problem, nothing in life or in the time of death, can take His presence away from you. Dear God, “where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me” (Psalm 139:7-10).