Psalm 139

In high school I memorized Psalm 139 and fragments and verses from the psalm have accompanied me ever since. "O Lord you have searched and know me" and "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." "Where can I go from your presence? If I go up to the heavens you are there; if I make my bed in the depths you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea..." Different pieces of the psalm have surfaced from my memory at different times as needed or as a surprise.

One line pulled me up short several months ago... years after I had dismissed it simply as connective content in the psalm. This line goes as follows: "You hem me in, behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me."

Until this past fall, this line evoked some vague notion of God as my mate, my protector, or even my Hip-Hop 'posse.' Talk about Trinity: he had my back, his hand on me, and was out front running interference as well. And this fit with my understanding of the psalm as a whole. It is filled with movement, and I've always attributed movement to this line as well. As I travel, my posse God has me covered.

Then I began to overhear how I was describing myself to anyone who would listen: I said I felt trapped and more than trapped: completely unable to move. And when I turned this immobility into a complaint to the divine, God whispered just one line from Psalm 139: "You hem me in behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me."

The therapist I've seen over the years would probably be relieved to know that I'm not hearing actual voices, but this line from 139 knocked me back onto my heels with all the force of personal address. And I think I now know the reason: God.

"You can't move, Kevin, because I won't let you. I have hemmed you in behind and before."

In an instant, this verse I'd merely gone through the motions to memorize became terribly clastrophobic. I was trapped because God had stopped dead immediately in front of me and was just as close behind - leaving no wiggle room - and his hand on me suddenly became heavy rather than light and reassuring.

"Why?!" I've now flung back at the heavens. "Why, God, have you so constricted my movement? Why?" And close behind this question was another: "How long has this been going on?" It is not that much of a stretch to say that this God trap had been slowly tightening around me for more than seven years.

Needless to say, this deeply disturbed me. On the one hand you could interpret such a God trap as attention. On the other, though, this immobility even if God is intimately involved is terrifying. It was as I mused on both these interpretations that another image came to mind: the picture of one of my own children in the days after they had learned to walk and run, but still had no real concept of danger. I remembered time and time again when I had to wrap my arms around one of them and not let go because where they wanted to go was out into a busy street or toward a cliff or a steep set of stairs. They screamed and fought to get free, to be able to move, but I saw what they couldn't yet see and refused to let go.

I may be mistaken, but I think this memory of holding onto my children might also be God speaking to me - God giving me a glimpse of what could true not just for my kids, but for me as his child.

"You hem me in, behind and before; you have laid your hand on me."

Someday a thank-you will probably be in order.

4th Grade Science Project

Two weeks ago one of my sons begged to enter his 4^th grade science fair, and reluctantly I agreed. My reluctance and my wife’s counsel to say ‘no’ this year was based on our experience last year where we did most of the work maintaining a live ant farm. Yet Peter begged and I finally agreed.

We decided to report on “lactose intolerance” since Peter has to be careful with dairy products.

As feared “Peter’s” Lactose Intolerance Project took a huge amount of MY time. Part of this time was time spent working together, but I also did more after Peter went to bed two different nights. For this time along with my rewording of some of Peter’s work I felt no small measure of guilt—it was supposed to be his project but here I was doing most of the work. As much as I had resisted entering the science fair in the first place, once we had committed, I wanted “his” project to look great.

Without consulting Peter I went hunting for great graphics online and purchased photo paper for all the information pages. I also supplemented the material he gathered with some of my own gathered from additional web sites.

Did you know, for instance, that the bodies of most people radically scale back the production the enzyme (lactase) used to breakdown the primary sugar in dairy products (lactose) just a few after birth? Or that lactose intolerance is directly linked to ethnic background? In a 1972 study published in the Scientific American, 100% of Native Americans, 98% of Thais, 93% of Chinese, and % of African Americans in the study group tested as lactose intolerant. Contrast this with only 12% of Caucasian Americans, 6% of Swiss, and 2% of Swedes. Apparently a chromosome level mutation passed down through Northern European ethnic groups allows them to happily continue to consume large amounts of fresh dairy products long after every other ethnic group would be groaning, gassing, and bloating in misery. And here is an even more intriguing factoid… the same is true for cats! European cats have the mutation as humans allowing them to consume milk when cats from other parts of the world—especially Asian breeds—are lactose intolerant.

Just whose 4^th grade science project was this I wondered as I climbed into bed last night. Then this morning it hit me that twenty-seven years ago my dad helped me build a vacuum out of a coffee can and a small electric fan, and that project all those years ago could really be called his science project. Today, the project Peter turned in was mine… twenty-seven years after the one I received credit for from my science teacher Ms. Kelly.

If things continue to follow this pattern in another 25-30 years Peter will do most of the work for a project that his son or daughter will take to school.

Maybe I don’t need to feel guilty for working so hard last night on “Peter’s” project; maybe I was simply finishing an assignment I received a grade for thirty years ago. And if so... for the record, Ms. Kelly, I tried to do “our” best work.