Start with God

Read

Psalm 139:1-6 “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”

Think

My mom went through a horrendous illness that lasted about three years. It was brutal. There were stretches of time when we did not know what was going to happen, when the doctors were running out of ideas, when the phone calls were heavy and the visits were heavier. And during that season, I learned something that has shaped the way I think about pain and about God ever since.

When I started with the illness, I ended up in dark places. When I woke up in the morning and the first thing on my mind was the diagnosis, the prognosis, the fear, I spiralled. The questions piled up. Why is this happening? How long is this going to last? What if it gets worse? What if she does not make it? When you start with the pain, the pain becomes the lens you see everything through. And a lens made of pain only shows you one thing: more reasons to be afraid.

But God taught me something during that season. He said, "Start with me." Not start with the diagnosis. Not start with the fear. Not start with the circumstances. Start with me. Start with my character. Start with my sovereignty. Start with the fact that I have not lost control of a single detail of this situation. And when I began doing that, when I began each morning by saying, "God, you are sovereign, you are good, you are present, and nothing about this illness has caught you off guard," the circumstances did not change. But my perspective did. Completely.

That is the shift David makes between Psalm 13:1 and Psalm 13:5. Nothing in his external world changed. The enemy was still there. The sorrow was still real. God had not suddenly answered every question. But David moved his focus from the problem to the Person. He stopped staring at the storm and started staring at the one who made the ocean. And that shift, that simple, difficult, daily choice to start with God instead of starting with the crisis, is what took him from "How long will you forget me?" to "I trust in your unfailing love."

Psalm 139 is the fullest picture in all of Scripture of what it means to start with God. David is not writing about a distant deity. He is writing about a God who is intimate, present, and inescapable. "You have searched me, Lord, and you know me." Not a surface-level knowledge. Not a passing familiarity. A thorough, penetrating, exhaustive knowledge that misses nothing.

"You know when I sit and when I rise." God knows when you collapse on the couch at the end of a hard day. He knows when you cannot get out of bed. He knows when you finally do.

"You perceive my thoughts from afar." Before the worry fully forms in your mind, before the fear takes shape, before the doubt solidifies into a sentence, he has already perceived it. He is not surprised by what you are thinking. He is not caught off guard by what you are feeling. He is ahead of it.

"Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely." Every prayer you have not prayed, he has already heard. Every cry you have not voiced, he already knows. Every question sitting in the back of your throat that you are too afraid to ask, he is already familiar with it. You do not have to find the right words. You do not have to articulate the perfect prayer. He knows what you need before you open your mouth.

I think about getting on an airplane. You sit in a seat at thirty-five thousand feet and trust a pilot you have never met, flying a machine you do not understand, through weather you cannot control. And you are fine with it. You lean your seat back and fall asleep. Why? Because you have decided that the person at the controls knows more than you do. You trust their competence. You trust their training. You trust that they can see things from the cockpit that you cannot see from row 27.

That is what it means to start with God. It is saying, "You can see things from where you sit that I cannot see from where I sit. And I trust that your knowledge is better than my anxiety." God is not watching your life from a distance, trying to figure out what is happening. He has searched you. He knows you. He is hemming you in behind and before. He is laying his hand on you. That is not the language of a God who has forgotten you. That is the language of a God who cannot stop paying attention to you.

During my mom’s illness, the days I started with God were not pain-free. The illness was still there. The fear still knocked on the door. But it did not run the house. Because when you start your day staring at the character of God, the problems do not disappear, but they shrink. They take their proper size. They go from being the biggest thing in the room to being one thing in a room that is already occupied by the God who knows you, sees you, hems you in, and has his hand on your life.

Start with him. Not with the news. Not with the diagnosis. Not with the text from the person who is making your life difficult. Start with the one who has searched you and knows you. Let his character be the first voice you hear in the morning. And watch what happens to the fear when it walks into a room that God got to first.

Apply

Reorder the morning – Before you check your phone, before you open the news, before you review the list of everything that is going wrong, spend two minutes declaring what is true about God. He is sovereign. He is good. He knows you. He is present. Start with him and let everything else take its proper size.

Pray

God, I confess that I have been starting with the wrong things. I have been waking up and letting the fear speak first, letting the circumstances set the tone for my day. Forgive me. You have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts before I can even form them. Today, I start with you. Your sovereignty, your goodness, your presence, your faithfulness. I let your character be the lens I see everything through. Not my pain. Not my fear. You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.