The earth trembles
Lily Cathcart
September 18, 2017
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Psalm 114
1 When Israel went out from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
2 Judah became God’s sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.3 The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
4 The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.5 Why is it, O sea, that you flee?
O Jordan, that you turn back?
6 O mountains, that you skip like rams?
O hills, like lambs?7 Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
8 who turns the rock into a pool of water,
the flint into a spring of water.
God loves us and is a kind and gentle God. Yet God also has so much more power and creative energy than we can perceive or imagine. The earth may well tremble at this awesome strength.
In the excellent series ‘Stranger Things’, a sci-fi horror set in early 1980s Indiana, there is a very different power beyond imagining and it makes the earth change and the people cower. Or rather I should say the adults cower. The series does an amazing job of highlighting the differences in reaction between children and adults to a scary situation beyond their understanding, without belittling either.
This is not to say that the children are not scared and that the adults do not fight back, but to point out that initially, when scared and confronted with an unknown dangerous power, in places that had been places of comfort, it is the children who do not separate, who come together, and form an outrageously ambitious plan.
I think it is because they have a bigger understanding of what they can do and are willing to be more flexible.
We as adults think we know what we are capable of but forget to imagine what we could be capable of. God, this awesome, powerful, scary God, knows we can do things even when we do not.
Dear God,
You are more than we know.
Sometimes you are scary but we know you love us.
Help us to use the creativity you gave us as children to be braver for you on this earth.
Amen.
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