in a broad place

Thou hast set my feet in a broad place.

-Psalm 31:8

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down,

and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

O Lord, you know it completely,

You hem me in, behind and before,

and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me

it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

if I make my bed in Shē’ōl, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and he light around me become night,"

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works; 

that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance,

In your book were written all the days that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!

How vast is the sum of them!

I try to count them--they are more than the sand;

I come to the end--I am still with you.

These are the first eighteen verses of Psalm 139.  Isn't it beautiful?  It's also alarming.  God knows us so deeply, sees everything we do, is always there.  I used to run from these words, but I've begun to find life in them.  

In his book The Spirit of Life Moltmann reflects on the way in which God both guards our hearts and sets us free.  On Psalm 31:8 ("you have set my feet in a broad place") he says "The divine Spirit is experienced as the Lord who sets free, and as the free space in which 'there is no more cramping.'"  Yet in the beautiful paradox of life in the Spirit, "it can also be said that 'Thou encompasseth me from every side' (Ps. 139:5); and people who have this experience know that they are kept safe and set free in the broad place of the Spirit in which they can breathe deeply and unfurl their potentialities."

I wish I lived in that open living space all the time, but the sad truth is that I am so often cramped in my anxious, self-focused existence.  And yet I believe there will come a day when we are all set free to live in a broad place, hemmed in by the love of God.


Source: Jurgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, p. 277