To rest between His shoulders

“Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in him,
for he shields him all day long,
and the one the LORD loves rests between his shoulders.”
Deuteronomy 33:12

We were created to lean back into the Lord like a woman reclines her back into a man’s body with his arms around her. It is a loving body position and shows intimacy between the two people. In this position, the woman rests in the man’s strength and feels secure, protected and loved. I think this verse is referring to the kind of relationship his beloved children were designed to have with the Lord, where we are leaning into him in all areas of our life. I believe this was perhaps our natural positioning with the Lord before the fall of man. But after the fall when sin entered the world, our body position with the Lord changed. The Lord still desires that we would rest between his shoulders–that we would be completely dependent on him. But because our sin and waywardness, we choose to put distance between ourselves and our first love and seek other things to satisfy us. As it says in Isaiah 53:6, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

Through my ordeal with cancer, I have realized that I have run into the arms of other lovers. I am not speaking of my relationship with my husband Chris, but about my relationship with the Lord. There are other lovers that I seek because I think they will bring me comfort, satisfaction and joy. Some of my lovers are having nice clothes, an organized home, constant fun and laughter with others, a respectable to do list, children who obey me. None of these things of course are bad in an of themselves, but making them into a lover takes it beyond a healthy point. So even though I am a follower of Christ, my life at times is filled with dissatisfaction and emptiness. Part of that reason, I believe, is because my heart is wrapped around other lovers.

I have struggled tremendously this past week with the whole idea of suffering. This struggle is not at all limited to my personal battle with breast cancer, but lies more in why a loving God allows so much suffering in this world. This is hardly a new question but it has hit me so hard. I have not only been terribly angry with the Lord, but confused and quite scared of him. I couldn’t even sing praise songs in church this past week because I couldn’t say any of those words to him.

One of my conclusions is that the Lord allows suffering because it hopefully sends us running back into the arms of our first love to resume that loving body position I described earlier. The Lord doesn’t need to be in that position, but we were made to live like that. It is in that position that we are fully satisfied and we are our true selves. We were made to be bound to his presence. He is a jealous God and will go to great lengths to show us our dependency on him. He is jealous for our satisfaction and joy.  Through Christ’s death on the cross, I now have access to God’s loving arms and am able to resume that intimate body position.  I still do not understand a lot about suffering but I know that the Lord is using my suffering to pry me out the arms of my other lovers so that I can rest fully in his arms where I belong.

Sara