Your Name Echoes around the World

This is a big psalm! Big, bold, beautiful! Needs a wall-sized canvas, a broad brush and buckets of primary colours.

As a youth camp counsellor some years back, I wondered how the teenagers in my cabin could be captured by the glory and majesty of our created world, but more importantly, be captured by God who created such splendor. My plan: go lie on our backs in the middle of the sports field at 11:00 pm and just look. At the stars and the sky. The swaying trees in the night breeze. The sounds of silence.

I was taken completely by surprise when my cabin of teenagers burst into spontaneous applause. How appropriate is that!

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

In this psalm, the writer has turned awe and applause into words for us, connecting divine majesty to the wonder of creation. A wonder expressed in the gurgles of babies breast-feeding, in head-thrown-back-in-laughter play of children. A wonder that silences arguments against the existence of God.

And in the middle of all this, the psalmist is overwhelmed that God, who has created such vast mysteries, is intimately involved in all that he has created, especially with the human creature. How is it possible, muses the psalmist, that God would even bother with us humans? Or imprint us with his personal god-image? Or who can understand why God would invite humans to care for his magnificent creation of earth?

Perhaps it is time to think once again, and to take seriously, our divine job description to care for domestic and wild animals, the birds, the fish, the whales, and one another. And to live up to our divine calling as God-appointed earth care-givers.

Perhaps it’s time to lie outside on our backs at midnight and catch a glimpse of glory once again.

Respond in Prayer

God of Majesty—I cannot say more than what the psalmist has said. Accept my silence as an offering of wonder and awe. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Elaine Pountney

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®).