Every Day Of My Life

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body

and knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!

Your workmanship is marvelous —how well I know it.

You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,

as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.

You saw me before I was born.

Every day of my life was recorded in your book.

Every moment was laid out

before a single day had passed. Psalm 139:13-16

THE KEY WORD IN PSALM 139 is know. It opens with David’s declaration that the Lord has searched him and knows him. David expresses the comfort he finds in the truth that God not only knew him when he was being formed in the womb, but knew how his life would take shape. David says that the story of his life —every single day —had been written in God’s book long before it even began.

This personal making, knitting, seeing, weaving, recording work of the sovereign God is, in many ways, comforting. But it can also be somewhat disconcerting. When the way our child was “woven together” in the darkness of the womb includes birth defects, we wonder how we can say sincerely, “Your work is marvelous.” On the day an accident happens or a serious illness begins, we struggle to believe a good God could have recorded this in the book of our child’s life before he or she was born.

The sovereignty of God —his ordaining of how our lives and the lives of our children will unfold —can be a very difficult truth to understand. If he is in control of everything, we wonder why he has allowed this universe to be ordered in such a way that brings pain. But while God’s sovereignty can be hard to accept, it is also a soft place to land. Because God is sovereignly bringing history and our lives to their appointed ends, we can rest.

Lord, your sovereignty is a solid rock underfoot when the winds of difficulty blow in our lives. It confronts what seems absurd in our existence. Your sovereignty is our greatest hope as we face an uncertain and unknown future. Help me to trust your sovereign plans for each day of ________’s life.