Help - Where?

PSALM 121
 - A Song of Ascents.

1 I lift up my eyes to the hills.  From whence does my help come?

2 My help comes from the Lord,
 who made heaven and earth.

3 He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber.

4 Behold, he who keeps Israel
 will neither slumber nor sleep.

5 The Lord is your keeper;
 the Lord is your shade
 on your right hand.

6 The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night.

7 The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

8 The Lord will keep
 your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.

Who doesn't need help?

When we are infants we are utterly dependent. As we get older, we learn to accomplish personal tasks, and frequently insist on accomplishing them unassisted. Our eagerness to be independent asserts itself early on, and only grows through adolescence into adulthood. Yet the time comes when we realize a need for others - to instruct us, to guide us, to coach us, to befriend us. "No man is an island," totally self- sufficient. Yet very often we still resist an honest admission of need - until we experience a crisis occurs that brings us low, and opens our understanding to our true condition.

When such an event occurs, where we turn for help makes all the difference. There are many who prey upon people in need, and seek to profit from their condition. They offer comfort and security, but their ability to deliver is always less than complete. When eventually we become disillusioned with empty promises, it is easy to give up on the one thing that keeps us going: hope.

Hopelessness is a deep, dark place, and robs the human spirit of motivation and purpose. It is the greatest of all miseries, and is the very essence of Hell itself. When we are in despair over irretrievable losses, whether they be of relationships, financial means, physical health, lost youth, personal freedom, or a loss of direction, of a sense of meaning and ultimate purpose in life, we can slide into hopelessness. And it is at the point of deepest, darkest hopelessness that we actually get a taste of what it must mean to be in a place where God is eternally absent. This is the fearful condition of those in Hell. No purpose. No fellowship. No joy. No hope.

Yet it is at this most precarious moment that we can discover God Himself.

As we reach out in desperation to the God we previously held at arms distance; as we turn in humility and submission to the Author of the life we call our "own," we find that He is the One who not only restores clarity concerning the real meaning and purpose of our lives, but showers us with love and forgiveness through His Son. It is in admitting our need of His ultimate assistance that we uncover our true design - that we are in fact created beings, designed to live dependently upon Him.

And in discovering - or rediscovering - His loving faithfulness, we again find hope. And we can find ourselves boasting not in our own strategies, but in Him. We find we can affirm with the Psalmist: "Where does my help come from? My help comes from the One who made those mountains, the One who made me, and the One who made my eternal home. He is strong, He is faithful - and He has my back!"