It’s snowing.
Big, fat flakes are falling, along with small ice pellets. I’m sitting on my couch, wrapped in my blanket, watching out the window, and am very content to sit here for hours, reading and writing–if I didn’t have work to do, that is.
It’s so beautiful.
And peaceful.
I’ve struggled for the past month-really, two months-with little peace. I’ve written about the odd place of being suspended between belief and unbelief Here.
But as I sit here watching the swirling snow, I am reminded of a passage of scripture that I read and wrote about this morning in the Psalms. It’s found in Psalm 121:1-8:
I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
3 He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
4 Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
5 The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
6 The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
8 The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
This is not a new scripture for me, and honestly, this morning I read it and wrote about it without it doing much to warm the cold heart inside of me. But now that I’m sitting here next to the snow, something is different.
I’ve always loved snow. Growing up in Iowa, you almost have to. I love everything about it…..it’s softness, it’s blizzard-ness, it’s whiteness, it’s clean-ness, driving in it, playing in it. I love it when it falls softly and I love it when it is blinding. I love snow. Snow means no school, and as a PK, it meant no church, too, growing up. Which I liked as well. It means an excuse to pause for a second. Especially here in Virginia where snow is not a common occurrence.
What does this have to do with the passage above? Well, it’s like this. I don’t think I realized until now, sitting in the dark and watching the snow, how God has been working in my soul over the past few weeks. A settling. A kind of “peace”. And sitting here, I can imagine Jesus saying “Shhh” to my troubled soul–especially through this Psalm that I read this morning.
Verse 3 culminates what I sense in my soul today:
3 He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
I’ve been so afraid that my “foot had been moved”…..so fearful that I could no longer find purchase for my soul. I had let fear not just grasp me, but grapple with me to the point of unbelief. A scary place to be in. Maybe you have been there.
But slowly, as I’ve returned to scripture work and prayer–while nothing “magical” or “intense” or “amazing” has happened–I realize sitting here that there is a burgeoning peace….similar to the small daffodils that are right now poking their yellow petals bravely above the snow. And I’m not a flower person. But their determination is a picture of the wavering yet steadily growing determination and peace that my own soul is experiencing.
But I didn’t see it coming. It wasn’t overnight. It wasn’t like a light switch turned on. It’s been a slow change….a slow gathering of facts—oh, please, may they be truth; be facts—that my Savior is real. And like in verse 5 and 7 of Psalm 121–He is the keeper of my life. Not me. Oh, not me, because I simply can not. I can not keep my life. Someone else must—my God must be the keeper of my life.
This peace I am experiencing, it is light. It is still fragile, but it is growing stronger—I can tell because I am just now becoming aware of it, though looking back I can see that it has been building through scripture work and writing and prayer. And service. The Messages Project — getting to work on that– has helped to build this peace. I am grateful.
So today I will not fear. And if I start to, I will fight it. I will fight it by looking at the snow and the stillness of the outside world, and will pray that God will still me, His child. Peace. That He will say “Shh” to me, if I should indeed become frightened. I will hold on to this peace that I sense growing in my soul.
And I will know that God is the keeper of my soul.
