Gotta Get a Guide

This is God, our God forever and ever. He will be our guide forever.
✙ Psalm 48:14
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Cat Stevens
It's not his best work, but I always liked Cat Stevens' 1972 song I Want to Live in a Wigwam. It was the B side of the hit record Morning Has Broken, and like a lot of his music back then, it was about his search for wholeness. I look at it now and cringe a little bit at the ethnic stereotypes: 
  • I'd like to live in a wigwam and dance round the totem pole
  • I'd like to live in an igloo and fish from an icehole
  • I'd like to ride on a caravan and sing with the gypsies
I assume he's grown in his understanding of humanity over the past half-century. And I assume his search ended when he converted to Islam. But there's a line at the end of Wigwam, repeated several times, which speaks to me of today's Bible verses: We gotta get to heaven get a guide.

God guides us in a number of ways—the beauty of nature and the concreteness of the written Word being two good examples. In the 48th Psalm, God is known by taking in the beauty of Zion—a geographic concept in the Hebrew Bible, but to Christians a metaphor for the people of God. And it is to the people of God—not individually, but as a church—that the Apostle Paul addressed Philippians 1:6—

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. 

If we would seek the guidance of God and trust in God to bring us through whatever our current reality is, let us dwell not on all that's gone wrong, but on the goodness that pointed us to God in the first place. We can search for it in our own lives, or we can search in the life of our community of faith. But wherever we look, we will see the goodness of God if we are not hellbent on seeking the negative. ✙
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Prayer after thinking about today's devotion:
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Guide me, O thou great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land. 
I am weak but thou art mighty; hold me with thy powerful hand. 
Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.
✙ William Williams (1745)
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After your own thanksgivings & petitions, close with the Lord's Prayer.
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