Just God and Me

If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. Psalm 139:8

A very wise friend once shared these words with me: When you realize God is all you have, you realize God is all you need.

It’s very natural that we don’t want to be alone. At the creation, the one thing God said was not good was “for the man to be alone,” (Genesis 2:18). So he made Eve.

Later He made the church. We’re not meant to do life alone, especially the Christian life.

But, there are some things we have to do alone.

Hopefully none of us is ever in a Robinson Crusoe, Tom Hanks-in-Cast Away situation. But if you live very long in this world, you will have times when it feels like there isn’t a single, solitary person who really understands you. There may even be times when you feel like there isn’t a single, solitary person who really cares about you.

Some struggles are private. And in many cases no one can fully understand or even perhaps fully invest in another’s concerns and troubles. If I may take some liberties with Matthew 6:34 (NIV), “each [person] has enough trouble of [his] own.” That’s why a relationship with God is so fundamental to getting through the tough times in life. Even if your pain is unknown to any other person on earth, God knows. Even when no one else seems to care, God cares. And He is really the only one who can fully know all the ins and outs, all the nuances of your story anyway. So even when your struggles are private, you don’t have to struggle alone.

But at the other end of the spectrum, I hope you have lived in Christ long enough that you have also experienced moments of sublime, spiritual joy. Because we’re created for relationship and community, those mountaintop experiences usually cause us to look around for someone to share them with; but again, sometimes the only one who can really understand is God. Some of the things we share with God cannot be put into words enough to share with anyone else. And if we do try, and we get that look from people that says they really don’t understand, we may find ourselves quoting the old line, “I guess you just had to be there.”

We were created to need people, but more than that we were created to need God.

There are some things that cannot be shared with anyone but God, either because of privacy reasons or simply because there’s no way to put it into words well enough for another person to “get it.” And because of this, sometimes just sharing something between you and God alone has to be enough. When you realize God is all you have, you realize God is all you need.

This is intimacy, folks. This is what it looks like to draw near to God.

But there’s one more point I’d like us to consider. Look at the graphic above. If God is with us at #1 and at #10, what about everything in between? What about when you’re cooking supper, absent-mindedly going through the things that happened at work, and/or being interrupted every 30 seconds by one of your children? What about the mundane times, or the times that move our emotions up and down the scale but not to the point of either devastating crisis or sublime joy? God is with us then too. It isn’t always just God and me. But He is always there. We need to remember that. We need to remember Him in those times as well.

There is plenty that can separate us, either externally or internally, from other people. But “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (Romans 8:38-39). Because God loves and cares for us, ultimately, He truly is all we need.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank You for being with me during my highs, my lows, and everything in between. Help me to be aware of Your presence at all times, and may I be able to rejoice in the realization that You, as my Creator, understand and know me perfectly. Thank you for loving me and caring for me. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

by Christie Cole Atkins

Related Reading:

Independent Faith