Protection from all harm

The Lord will protect you from all harm; 

He will protect your life. 

The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever.

-Psalms 121:7-8

Isn't that so reassuring.  It's like "yes! Come on now!  Bring that good stuff in, I'm seeing some bad crap going on and I need proof that God is really good!"  Protection.  It's strange that we have such a need for it, and yet most of us seek for it in ourselves.  We think we can protect ourselves the best or we might think we know what protection looks like from our angle.  Which makes sense, we all have God-created abilities to react in a potentially dangerous situation such as an oncoming car, a bear approaching our camp, slipping on a wet floor, or avoiding that flat tire on the freeway.   Some may have keener abilities than others depending on their natural God-made instincts from birth or some may have had numerous amounts of practice and preparation for such events.  Regardless, even though we want to use evidence of our abilities to react or respond in dangerous situations as helpful or even life saving, we can all universally agree that not one person can protect themselves from ALL dangers.  Not one.  Let's even go so far as to agree that not even a whole spectrum of gathered people's working together could protect themselves from ALL dangers, albeit it's wise to do their best.  It's pretty much what the world and cultures have been doing since the beginning.  We want to flourish or live better, and depending on your definition of "live", that will entail all kinds of things: medical discoveries, healthy diets, education, habits, and social practices.  Everyone is working at "living" better, maybe that means longer or happier or more productively, but we can all agree that if someone prefers to live a degenerative life there is probably something wrong with them.  

Protection means life can improve.  Why?  Because in order to move along these currents of flourishing we need to be alive and well to do so!  You might argue that I'm using the word in too broad of a sense, but I just want to get at the root of the word.  Protection is not just what it immediately appears to be such as being shot at and wearing a protective vest or when you slip and someone protectively catches you before you fall.  Protection at a much deeper level is that now that the protection action has happened the protected life can continue.  What we do with our lives is a measure of how protected we are.  

I won't go into all the implications this leads to such as anxiety, fear, hypochondriacs, worry, and incessant paranoia, but I want to briefly reiterate the value of knowing and believing you are protected by God in this life and in the next.

This protection is not that you'll never get sick or that you'll never be seriously injured, hurt, or handicapped.  This protection is the deeper root of being able to live well, and I'll even go so far as to say it is the gift of living better because of those situations.  My point is that harm and suffering in this world will happen regardless of how much we try to protect ourselves from them.  This is not a bad thing, unless that's all you rely on.  God provides the most whole sense of the word "protection" by intertwining it with life and flourishing.  When you read:

"The Lord will protect you from all harm; He will protect your life. The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever."

-Psalms 121:7-8

I contend that this protection from all harm is the all encompassing harm of degeneration.  Harm is a life spent in stunted failure or a backward flow in languish.  Someone who loses an arm might be hurt, but if that person's life is spent joyfully living well because they use their testimony to point to the saving grace of God and how losing his arm actually made him more grateful for having the other arm and then realizing the preciousness of life which led to him walking more boldly in his dreams and so forth, then that person is flourishing as a result or by product of the action of what happened to his arm.  Now I'm not downplaying the agony of such hurtful instances, they are indeed painful and not one instance of pain is the same as another.  I want to show that this example was what protection from God looks like.  God's protection is life and a flourishing one at that. 

We may fail in our jobs, our schools, our relationships and in our health among many other failures.  Consider what you find to be a failure in your life right now. 

Seriously.  What do you think you've failed at in the past or in the present? 

I'm thinking more along the lines of circumstances that look to be harming your life. 

"The Lord will protect you from all harm; 

He will protect your life. 

The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever. 

-Psalms 121:7-8 

Believe that what is happening or has happened to you was allowed to occur because God knows what He is doing.  He is protecting you. 

Both now.

And forever, meaning eternity is yours.

Consider all your circumstances.  

Not a single one was without His protection. 

The question here is "what were You doing when that happened, and what are You doing now?"

You were made to flourish. 

Jmegrey