He will keep your life

The call to worship on Sunday was Psalm 34, and as we all read the words aloud together, I was taken back to a bottom bunk bed late on a Tuesday night in Berlin, just two nights before I left. Claire could not go to sleep, and when she appeared in my doorway again at 10:15, I went in to lay with her for a while. Instead of snuggling in, she rolled over on her tummy and propped up her chin in her hands, smiling at me in the dark. Then her face sobered. "Why do you have to leave?" she asked. "I wish you could just stay here." So we made imaginary plans to fly back and forth to visit each other every day, and she was happy again. We were quiet for a while, and I asked if she'd like to say Psalm 34 together, a Psalm we'd both learned in the months I'd been in Berlin.

I will extol the Lord at all times, his praise will always be on my lips.
My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice.
Glorify the Lord with me; let us exalt his name together.
I sought the Lord and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
This poor man called and the Lord heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them.

Sometimes I knew the next verse and prompted her; other times I paused to search for the next phrase and Claire barreled ahead, jogging my memory. The whispered words slipped off our tongues into the dark room, Lilah sleep-breathing above us. "Did you learn this when you were a kid too?" Claire asked, assuming that surely at twenty-eight I wouldn't still be memorizing the same Psalms she was learning at five.

And at the close of our service this past Sunday, Luke blessed us with a benediction from Psalm 121, a psalm Lilah and I had memorized together.

The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever more. 

I could see Lilah's little hands, cupping to copy the picture that went with the verse, and hear her interrupting our recitation to say, "God's doing this, Julie, God's doing this to us!"

And I had a sense that God was, indeed, doing this to me, bookending the church service with these rich Psalms, surrounding me with love from one side of the world to the other, keeping watch over my comings and goings, encamping around me from the beginning to the very end.