Is God In My Pillow?

My four-year-old granddaughter padded, softly, down the hallway from her bedroom into the family room, carrying her pillow in her arms.  “Daddy, is God in my pillow?” she asked, in an obvious attempt to stall bedtime.  

My son and daughter-in-law glanced at one another, recognizing this as one of those “gotcha” moments of a child to a parent.  Her mom responded, “Yes, Evie, God is everywhere.”  

“Even in my pillow?”

Her dad answered, “Even in your pillow.  Evie, there is nowhere you can go that God is not.”

Her response to this profound revelation?  “Then, I guess I had better stop talking to my pillow like that.”  

As I chuckled over this teachable moment, wondering, at the same time, what a four year old says to her pillow, I could not help but think of the times that we, as women, wonder if God is anywhere in our life.  In the darkness of the night, the loneliness of the hour, the apparent emptiness of our life, or the ache of our heart, we wonder if God is there.  

In Daniel 3, as the three Hebrew children, Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, were about to be tossed into the fiery furnace for refusing to worship false gods, Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar asked them, “Where is your God, now?” 

There have been times in my own life, in those midnight hours, I, too, called out, “Where are you, God?  Are you here?”  In the middle of that pain, the Holy Spirit moved in a teachable moment, reminding me that God is everywhere – never leaving us, never forsaking us, going with us to the highest mountaintop and carrying us in the lowest valley. 

No matter where you find yourself today, God is there.  The Psalmist David said in Psalm 139 that God is there when we sit down, when we rise up, when we lie down, if we ascend into heaven, or descend into the lowest pits of our lives.  He is with us on the wings of the mornings and in the deepest waves of the ocean threatening to swallow us.  He is there, too, even in the darkest of night.

Occasionally, we need to be reminded that God is, indeed, even in our pillow…

© 2010 Gerry Sisk

(2/14/10)