My dwelling place
by Jim Strelan
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Lord, you have been my dwelling place throughout all generations (Psalm 90:1).
Read Psalm 90:1–8,12
When our daughter was very young, and we came ‘home’ from Papua New Guinea on leave, she got confused. One night, we found her whimpering in her bed, and when we asked her what was bothering her, she said she felt bewildered. We talked about going ‘home’ to Australia, and we talked about how we would soon be going ‘home’ to Papua New Guinea. So, where is home? We told her that wherever the three of us are, that’s home. Home is where she belongs, is safe, secure, and at ease.
The psalmist says that God has been his people’s home for all generations, their dwelling place. It’s where they rest. It’s where they feel safe. It’s where they belong. It is home.
What a wonderful thing to say about our God. When we get to the latter part of our lives, we realise how fragile life is. For those of us at this stage, we become aware that we are spending more and more of our time at funerals. One by one, people we knew, grew up with and made friends with, even members of our own families, die. But there is comfort. God is eternal, and his presence with us never diminishes.
He has been our home through all the days of our lives; he is our home now, and he will be the one we go home to when the time comes for us to die. It’s okay. We don’t need to be anxious. We don’t need to curl up into ourselves to feel secure. God sees us, knows us, loves us and wants to be our dwelling place today, tomorrow and always.
Dwell in God as he dwells in you. In Revelation 21:3, a voice describing the end of time says, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with [people] and he will live with them.’ His home will be our home and our home his. How good is that?
Loving God, I rest in you. In you, I find the place where I belong. Thank you. Amen.
Jim is a retired pastor living with his wife Ruth in Deception Bay, Queensland. He spends his retirement making space to add more Lions’ premiership posters to the six (3+3) he already has on his garage wall.
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