“Where can I go from your Spirit? 
    Where can I flee from your presence? 
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; 
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, 
    if I settle on the far side of the sea, 
even there your hand will guide me, 
    your right hand will hold me fast. 
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me 
    and the light become night around me,’
even the darkness will not be dark to you; 
    the night will shine like the day, 
    for darkness is as light to you.“

Psalm 139:7-12 

–

JULY 16, 2025

 

When I was in college, I signed up to do my senior internship in a rural village in India. This felt like a huge step because I was traveling alone (at least with no one I had met before). Not only had I never been to India, but I had never left the country. Not even a short jaunt to Canada! I couldn’t even imagine what was waiting for me in the months ahead, or how I would handle it all alone. 

The night before I left, I couldn’t sleep. I tried to imagine all that lay before me: waking early while it was still dark, boarding a huge plane, rising into the sky, settling down on the other side of the planet.  

That’s when the words I memorized so long ago came back to mind: 

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 

I was going up into the heavens! I was planning to rise on the wings of dawn and settle on the far side of the sea. And even though the psalmist surely did not have me in mind (or airplanes, or even a spherical planet) in mind when he wrote these words, yet God’s hand did guide me, His hand did hold me fast.  

Friend, we so rarely feel God’s presence as palpably as we would like to. We don’t hear His voice or see His face or feel His hand resting on our shoulders. But there is nowhere we can flee where God is not beside us, no darkness so grave He cannot see us.
 

Questions for reflection and discussion:  

  • When have you longed to feel and see God’s presence?  
  • When has God inexplicably shown Himself to you?  
  • How does this psalm hit you? What do you notice, or what words stand out? 

 Church Reading Plan: Joshua 23; Acts 3