For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalm 139: 13-14
We memorize this scripture.
Write it down and hang it in our bathrooms. Above the dresser. In the kitchen window, where the paper is splattered with dish water, bacon grease and the stains of time.
Our children learn it in Awana and Sunday school, memorizing each word and phrase, proudly beaming, (and loudly proclaiming) hands on hips that they are: fearfully and wonderfully made!
But what happens when you stop believing it?
When the doctor’s diagnosis tells you the opposite.
When the body that is supposed to never fail you—does just that?
When everyone else’s “normal” that they take for granted is your very, very abnormal and nothing is working the way you were told it should.
I stared at this scripture for a good long time the other morning. And I realized: I don’t believe the words on the page.
That’s not a fun realization to make and my soul shrank back from the visceral truth of it. Was I really studying a piece of God’s holy and inspired word and telling Him that I didn’t believe Him?
Yes, yes I was.
I carefully underlined the words, staring at the harsh pink line I had chosen as my color that morning.
I couldn’t dare utter the words—let alone really allow myself to think the thought—that I no longer believed that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. All the childlike innocence had fled and been replaced with a hardened adult viewpoint.
Yet, I could not escape the truth—but I couldn’t stay mired it in either.
What do you say when you don’t believe the words of God, but know that you can’t stay there?
To be honest with God is probably one of the hardest and best things I have ever done. Time and again, I secret hard truths away, not wanting to trouble my Abba Father with such raw honesty.
You can stop laughing now.Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you
I know. I know.
Never my finest moments. I never claimed them to be.
But the truth of God and His word is it never ends at just the one phrase. For just one line lower, still in this same chapter of Psalm 139 is another truth:
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it 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 saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. Psalm 139: 15-16
My frame was not hidden from you.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance.
My soul knows it very well.
If I’m to say I am not “fearfully and wonderfully made” and struggle to accept this truth then I’m in fact saying that God is not sovereign. Holy. Powerful. Truthful. Perfect.
Sin is such a corrupt institution, but if David, a man after God’s own heart and as sinful and unholy as you and I, could say that God intricately wove him together in the depths of the earth, are my struggles so far out of the reach of a healing and holy God?
And maybe my truth will always be this moment: of accepting that no matter what, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
I won’t lie: I’m still learning how to swallow this word. Accepting this mantle and not trying to shrug out of the tight or uncomfortable.
I’m accepting. I’m learning.
I’m learning to accept and lean in, place my hand inside my Abba Father’s and whisper the words of this Psalm back to Him: Wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well.
It’s becoming my anthem.
Do you struggle to view yourself as fearfully and wonderfully made? Yet, what does God’s word say about this? @C_Herringshaw
