Bouncing Down the Road (Friday Devotional)

 

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

- Psalm 46:13

A couple days ago, I was driving up Centerville Road when I spotted something out of the ordinary in front of me. It was a large, red, inflatable ball—the kind you see for $5 in a cage at Walmart—bouncing down the road. Maybe it had been in the bed of somebody’s pickup truck and had bounced out, maybe it had been thrown out the window of a passing car like litter, who knows? But there it went, bouncing down the 6-lane road.

It was never a hazard for me—I was in the left lane and it was in the right—but I watched the ball from the moment it caught my attention until long after I drove past it. I was waiting for something—for the moment a car hit the ball head-on and popped it. But as far as I know, that ball just kept bouncing down the street. The last I saw, it was still bouncing down Centerville Road.

Something about that bouncing red ball felt metaphorical to me, felt like life. All of us are, in a sense, like that ball. Every day we do the basic things we know how to do—we go to work, we spend time with friends, we do our chores, we eat, we sleep. We bounce down the road.

But for most of us, there is a persistent feeling of insecurity. What if I get laid off? What if my friends move away? What if the doctor tells me I have cancer? All it takes is one big event, one head-on collision, and life as you know it could come to an end. We need something to make us feel safe, something to make us feel less afraid in a fearful world.

In Psalm 46, the writer speaks of God as a “refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” The psalmist doesn’t live in some pie-in-the-sky fiction where bad things never happen to good people; he has seen enough life to know that things can get dangerous quickly.

But “though the earth should change”—whether through natural disaster, manmade crisis, or any sort of peril—the psalmist says he will not fear. He knows the Lord is with him, so ultimately he is secure.

Life can make you feel like you’re a fragile inflatable ball bouncing down a busy road, just moments away from being run down. But the Bible tells you who to trust in your fear and insecurity—not your own strength and wisdom, but the Lord’s. Keep bouncing, and trust God to get you where you need to be.