Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

It’s no surprise when we’re battered at the office, late hours, hard work, difficult colleagues. It’s not unexpected when we encounter frustration at the car repair shop or long lines in the grocery store express lane.

But some places are supposed to be safe.

The images from Oklahoma are wrenching, but none more than the pictures that show what isn’t there. Two elementary schools are obliterated, reduced to smoldering piles of splintered wood and broken concrete.

When you send a 7-year-old to school, you’re not supposed to have to worry if she will make it home alive. It doesn’t seem right to read that students still clutching math books huddled in hallways, clinging to life.

Home is supposed to be safe, yet we know for three women in Cleveland that home for the past decade was a place of chains, terror, and unimaginable abuse.

Churches are supposed to be safe—not places exempt from struggle and challenge, but at least safe harbor among people of goodwill. But we witness power grabs and powerful self-interests that upend congregations, malcontents sowing fear and distrust.

It can feel like God has forsaken us, left without warning from these places of safety, leaving us alone to battle.

Psalm 121 reminds me this isn’t true. And it helps me learn again not to take refuge in places, not to imbue bricks and mortar with human want.

God provides safekeeping in a deep and abiding way that no place ever can. God hears the prayers of children trapped in the rubble, of young women who call for freedom, of people emotionally stripped bare.

Some places are supposed to be safe, but they won’t always be. Thank goodness God is there when they’re not.

Psalm 121
Assurance of God’s Protection
A Song of Ascents.

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and for evermore.