I have a confession that’s much to the shame of my gender.

I’m…directionally challenged.

Yep, it’s true.  The sad reality is I can’t get from home to my Monday morning coffee shop without thinking of the route first.  If I go somewhere for the first time, I wouldn’t be able to get back to my starting point by myself.  Ask me where something is and I probably can’t tell you.  Ask me to go somewhere new and I’m hopeless.

Thank goodness for GPS. With it, I’m able to confidently get anywhere.  “Don’t tell me how to get there,” I say, “Just give me an address.”   One of my recent celebrations was when I got from a coffee shop on the other side of Baton Rouge to my house without running my GPS—without any wrong turns!  But I learned this route because of my handy guide.

In our spiritual lives, we have a Guide too.  Several in fact.  In one of the oldest Psalms in the entire book of Psalms, we find Moses writing about his guide. Psalm 90:1-2 declares:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place

throughout all generations.

Before the mountains were born

or you brought forth the whole world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Moses in the Bible’s story.  He was a Hebrew child who was adopted into a Pharaoh’s family.  After killing an Egyptian guard, Moses ran into the wilderness where he became a sheepherder.  God appeared to him from a bush that was on fire but not burning and called him to be the liberator of the Jewish people.  Moses leads them out and then has to endure forty years of their complaining and general lack of appreciation of his leadership.

Moses was a man without a country.  Yet, he writes about the Lord being his “dwelling place”.  Interesting choice of words.  The man with no country calls God his home.  It’s a fitting choice of words for a nomad but how often do we forget we’re nomads too?

Perhaps we’re not literally wandering across a desert leaving slavery behind but in a spiritual sense we are, nevertheless, not home yet.  We are traveling through this world and although it’s all we see now, it’s not home.

Instead, our home is with the Lord, our dwelling place.  It’s in His protection and grace we find our home until we truly reach “home”.  And it’s only when we see things from the perspective of “the unseen world” that we become truly aware of the land waiting for us.

But until then, we walk with Him through the Holy Spirit.  Now, we rest knowing that He leads us through the deserts, doubts, celebrations, and conquests.  Indeed, He is our dwelling place—our haven, our home, our hope.  He is source of refreshment and respite until the day He leads us home.