He Knows What I Am Made Of

He has been standing in the plumbing aisle for eleven minutes and he does not need anything.

That is the part that would look strange if anybody was watching, and nobody is, because it is a Saturday morning in a hardware store and everybody has their own list. He picked up a fitting he does not need, and he has turned it over about forty times, and what he is actually doing is not shopping.

He is having a conversation he has been having for a year, and losing.

The conversation is with God, and it is not about the thing. He has been over the thing so many times that it has worn smooth. The conversation is about what God must think of him now, and it always arrives at the same place, and the place is disappointment.

Not anger. He could handle anger, he thinks. Anger is loud and it finishes. Disappointment is that particular quiet thing, the sound of somebody who had expectations and has revised them. He can picture it exactly, because he has been on the receiving end of it before, from a man whose approval he wanted very much, and that face has been standing in for God's face ever since without either of them being consulted about the arrangement.

So he stands in an aisle with a fitting in his hand, at forty three years old, bracing for a look.

And here is the thing about that look. It requires somebody to have been surprised. Disappointment is what happens when a person turns out to be made of something other than what you assumed. It is the emotion of a revised estimate.

Which means that in order for God to be disappointed in him, God would have had to be working from an estimate.

That is you in the aisle.

You've been bracing for a face. It is a real face, and you have seen it, and it belonged to somebody who mattered. And at some point it became your working picture of what God does when He looks at you now.

He knew the material before He started

David writes something about God that is so plain it can go past you. Read the reason clause, because the reason is the whole comfort.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:13-14

He knoweth our frame. He knows the build. He knows the material, the tolerances, the way it behaves in heat. And then, in case knowing were not enough, David adds the second verb, and the second verb is the one that does the work: he remembereth.

Remembering is not the same as knowing. A person can know something and forget it in the moment that matters. God knows what you are made of and He also holds it in mind at the exact moment you are most sure He has forgotten.

You have never once been overestimated by God, which means there is no revised estimate waiting for you and no disappointment available, and I am not making Him soft: Psalm 103:14 says He remembers we are dust, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my telling you so who can put that where a man's face has been standing for a year.

Sit with what that removes. Disappointment needs a gap between what was expected and what turned up. God has no gap. He has been fully informed about the material since before you were born, and the fact that He went ahead anyway is not an oversight He is now regretting.

You are pitied rather than reassessed, and pity in this verse is a father's word and not a distant one, which is written in Psalm 103:13 rather than being my hope for you, with the Spirit of God able to swap a face that has been doing God's job for a year.

Now let me say something about that word pity, because in English it has gone sour and it did not start that way. It is not looking down on somebody. It is the movement of a father's whole self toward a child who is struggling, and every parent I have ever sat with knows it: your child fails at something and what rises is not a revised opinion, it is a movement toward them.

That is the verb in the verse. That is what is happening while you stand in an aisle turning a fitting over.

This is yours right now, at eleven minutes, with nothing on your list, because Scripture puts the knowing and the remembering side by side, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a hardware store rather than leaving it in a psalm.

And here is the last thing. Dust is not an insult in that sentence. It is what God chose to work with in the first place, on purpose, and He has never once acted surprised by what dust does.