Dwelling place

"Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." — Psalm 90:1-2

I read the Ninetieth Psalm this morning and I stopped at the word generations.

It is a word I have read a thousand times. I know this psalm the way I know the Lord's Prayer, which is to say I know it so well that I sometimes read it without hearing it. But this morning I heard it. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. I sat with that word and I let it do its work.

My grandmother stood at a stove in a kitchen not so different from this one. My mother stood at the same stove after her and then at her own stove in her own kitchen. I stand at mine. The kitchen is not the same kitchen and the stove is not the same stove but the standing is the same standing and the morning is the same morning. The coffee my grandmother drank was percolated on the back of the stove and the coffee my mother drank was from a Mr. Coffee and the coffee I drink is from a machine with a timer that Earl bought in 2017, but the drinking of it at the table while it is still dark is the same act repeated across three kitchens and three women and seventy years that I can account for and longer than that if I could see further back.

Dwelling place. I sat with that too. The psalm does not say God is our refuge, though he is. It does not say God is our fortress, though other psalms say that. It says dwelling place. A dwelling place is where you live. It is the kitchen table and the coffee and the chair and the window and the list of names in the journal. It is the ordinary room you return to every morning. It is the place you know without thinking about it because your body has memorized the distance from the counter to the table, from the table to the door, from the door to the porch where the dog is waiting.

God has been the dwelling place of my grandmother and my mother and me. The same dwelling place. Not three separate shelters but one house with many rooms and many generations walking through it. I do not fully understand what this means. I understand that it means something about continuity and something about rest and something about the way the morning feels the same even when everything else has changed.

Before the mountains were brought forth. Before the earth. Before the world. Before my grandmother's kitchen and my mother's kitchen and mine. From everlasting to everlasting. The psalm puts God before everything and after everything and the kitchen table is somewhere in the middle, and the woman sitting at the kitchen table is somewhere in the middle, and the morning is somewhere in the middle, and the middle is the dwelling place, and the dwelling place is God.

Lord, you have been our dwelling place. That is enough for this morning.