Nothing in the world prepared me to hold our daughter that first time, and though I believed I knew what it would be like nearly four years later when the process repeated with the birth of our son, the emotions overwhelmed me again. In both of these moments, the sense of awe and wonder that these two children had been entrusted to Lauren and me was more than mere words can ever convey. Our children are gifts from God. He who has known them, knows us—from before the moment of birth knows us, both our great good and our most shameful failings, and continues to love us.
We often read and say these words as a reminder of God’s omniscience, of His all-seeing knowledge, yet to me they always speak to our Heavenly Father’s love and grace. When we understand that the Lord knows us, not merely as some idea that He holds in mind but rather with the intimacy of having created us, of having knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, and that in that moment, He knows all of the days of our lives, we can see that God has always known us as who we truly are.
A few weeks ago, during our traditional services, the choir sang the hymn, Christ Has Broken Down the Wall, which contains the line, “We’re accepted as we are and reconciled through God’s love.” Those words point me to the grace we can see in this psalm, where God who knows us also accepts us, not as He desires that we will one day be but as we are. It is through the love of our Father that we are washed clean of our failings and our sins. Praise be to God!