There's No Place You Could Hide From My Love

David knew a lot about hiding.
When King Saul hunted him,
he hid in hills and deserts and caves.
Once Saul walked into David's own cave
to go to the toilet and never saw him.
(David crept up and sliced a corner off Saul's robe.
Saul strolled out with a hole in his clothes
and no idea.)

But there was one Person
no one could ever hide from,
and David wrote a song about him.

"LORD, you have searched me,
and you know me.
You know when I sit down
and when I get up.
You know what I am thinking
from far away.
Before a word is even on my tongue,
you know it completely.
You have laid your hand on me.
It is too wonderful for me.

"Where could I go to get away from you?
If I climbed up into the heavens,
you are there.
If I lay down in the deep place of the dead,
you are there.
If I rode the wings of the morning
and landed on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand would lead me.
Your right hand would hold me tight."

(Morning light races west across the sea.
David pictured riding it to the world's edge
and finding God already there.)

"If I said, 'Let the dark cover me up,'
the dark would not be dark to you.
The night shines like the day,
because dark and light are the same to you.

"You made every part of me.
You knit me together inside my mother.
I praise you,
because you made me in a wonderful way.
You saw me before I was born.
Every one of my days was written in your book
before a single one of them began."

(Knitting goes one loop at a time.
God made David that way,
bone by bone, where no eye could see.)

"How precious your thoughts about me are, O God!
If I tried to count them,
there would be more than all the grains of sand."

David must have dozed off counting,
because the next line is,
"When I wake up, I am still with you."

David begged God to stop his enemies,
cruel men who told lies about God.
Then he turned the searching light on himself.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way that lasts forever."

David could sing that God's hand held him,
but he never saw that hand.
And when God searched David's heart,
he found wrong there that needed forgiving.
In the end David died,
and his tomb in Jerusalem was still there
a thousand years later.
But God had promised David a forever king from his own family,
and God's people kept waiting for him.

Then, in the dark inside a young woman named Mary,
God knit together another baby,
one bone at a time.
This time it was God's own Son becoming a human being,
with real hands that could hold on.
He knew what was in every heart
and loved people anyway.
He went down into death,
the deepest place in David's song,
and the dark could not keep him.

Alive again, he met his friends on a mountain
and sent them out to the far side of every sea.
"I am with you always," Jesus told them,
"to the very end of the world."
However far they went, he would already be there.