My Guardian Angel Was Busy

It’s All in the Details

The LORD directs the steps of the godly. 

He delights in every detail of their lives.

Though they stumble, they will never fall, for the LORD holds them by the hand.

Psalms 27:23-24

I think my guardian angel must miss my time in prison. We all like to be busy and back then he was busy! That first day he had to work quickly because walking into prison felt like an out of body experience for me and I was stumbling like the walking dead. The outright hostility from the guards and the obvious curiosity from other inmates was enough to put anyone on edge. I self surrendered, which in real life means that on a court-assigned date you simply show up on at the front door to begin your sentence. On a side note, Bernie Ebbers was in the same facility and rumor had it that he drove himself to his self surrender and his Mercedes sat in the parking lot for months afterwards.

After the intake process, which I went through in a dream state of surreality, it came time to go meet my new neighbors. When it was time to go to my housing unit the guards pointed me towards an interior door and told me to head out. Now for someone who had never been in a prison, being told to start walking through the middle of the compound, alone, an hour after you got there, is a bit disconcerting. My only prison reference was TV so I imagined walking through “the yard” with inmates lifting weights and playing basketball, all while watching the newbie arrive. I’ll admit to having a few butterfly’s at the thought! Thankfully, my guardian angel stepped in and before I could head out the door, an inmate in a backroom walked out and volunteered that he was in the same housing unit and would walk me to it. Armed with my little starter package of sheets, towels, and soap, I followed him out the door.

We didn’t see a soul on the walk and it occurred to me that I had a lot to learn about prison. My new “friend” did get me where I needed to go and connected me with the right people. He even gave me some deodorant and a toothbrush to get me started. This is just one instance of hundreds that I remember where things could have gone much differently for me in prison if not for coincidental happenings in just the nick of time. Now I don’t have any idea if we have guardian angels but I don’t believe in coincidence either.

If we do happen to have them, mine has been supremely bored lately.

Consider this, there are 100 billion stars in our little galaxy, the Milky Way. There are an estimated two trillion galaxies in the universe, which puts the number of stars at something like one septillion -  that’s a one followed by 24 zeros. And some unimaginable number of planets around all those stars. In short, there’s a lot to see out there. Supernovas and black holes and wonders we can’t imagine………It all sounds so exciting.

My life……not so much!

The things he could be doing out there in all that universe, instead he’s stuck watching me work and eat and mow the grass and occasionally run around the neighborhood. Uuckk!

But I understand obedience and my angel is just being obedient. 

What really throws me for a loop is when I read that the Lord delights in the details of my life. My angel’s just following orders, but the Lord…He delights? I don’t even delight in the details of my life! 

The word delight conjures up caramel and chocolate for me. Strawberry delight or pineapple delight or even better, Oreo delight. It’s a word not used much anymore except in deserts. I google the word delight and get definitions like: a feeling of great pleasure, satisfaction, or happiness. The word used in the above scripture for delight is the word hapes, in Hebrew and it means to take extreme pleasure in, to desire, be pleased with.

While the fact that God delights in the details of my life is mind boggling, I suspect it's more than just voyeuristic pleasure. I was pondering on this when I was running this past weekend and I wondered about God’s interest in watching me slowly make my way down the road. I’m slow and these country roads I run on are hot with tall grass on either side. I keep my eyes out for snakes because I would have an actual heart attack if a snake started across the road as I was running by. I thought how odd that I never see snakes when running but see them all the time when driving the very same roads.  

Then it hits me that maybe my life appears boring because of God’s interest. Maybe the regular things I do are only regular because of God’s interest. What if my guardian angel is up ahead of me shooing snakes away from the edge of the road. Snake bites and hospitals are certainly exciting but they’ll make you wish for boring. Maybe the excitement in my life is not in the things I see but in the things I don’t see. It’s possible my guardian angel isn’t as bored as I thought. I find myself praying he keeps up the good work and that the part of reality that I perceive stays totally humdrum. When I get to Heaven I look forward to seeing a playback of my life and all the instances God intervened before something befell me.

While I can’t get my head around God’s delight, I’ve got a little inkling of how He cares………When I look at my daughter I feel just a sliver of how God must look at us.

When I ponder grandchildren I taste a drop of how God looks at His children. You know grandparents think anything a grandchild does is endlessly fascinating.

While I don’t hear the word delight much in my everyday life, I can't imagine a better descriptor of a life with God at the center of it. It is truly delightful to belong to Him!

I pray you do!