Devotionals by Dr. M. Craig Barnes
You are a hiding place for me. --
When I was a kid, our neighbors had a bomb shelter built in their backyard. I was pretty young at the time, but even then I wondered how this little cement hole in the ground was going to protect anybody from an atomic bomb. At least that was a better hiding place than they gave us at school. There we practiced sitting under our desks for bomb drills. It all sounds so ridiculously inadequate now.
Most of us don't worry as much about "the bomb" these days, but we are all still anxious about something. Cancer maybe. Or losing your job. Or the thousand different ways your children can get hurt. It doesn't matter how healthy your diet is, what kind of financial shelter you build, or how many times you try to drill carefulness into your kids, you're still not safe. None of these plans will insure your protection any better than if you were sitting under a desk.
When King David calls the Lord his hiding place, he's not expecting that he will be spared any heartache in life. But he is expecting that he will survive every heartache, because in the love of the Savior he has found the one thing he can never lose. Your life is also safely hidden in God's heart and nothing can remove you from him. The Savior is not a bomb shelter. To the contrary, he's the one calling you to walk back into the world unafraid, knowing that he will always walk with you.
-- Craig Barnes