Set Apart

Psalm 139:14 has been popping up all over the place this week.  Friday was my son's birthday and also the day he started his 2nd grade curriculum.  And lo, that verse was prominent in several of his subjects.  Perfect for a birthday!  Those words (and others from that Psalm) came pouring out of my mouth as encouragement to a struggling friend that same night. Sunday night it was used in the children's department at church, and today, my husband's birthday, it appeared in my daily devotional time.

I guess I oughta pay attention, eh?

Psalm 139:14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

Plenty of good and true applications for this verse.  Appreciation for the marvelous intricacies of the human body. Gratitude and amazement for the works God has done in creating us and leading us to where we are today.  There's even a dose of self-affirmation in there...sometimes it takes a leap of faith for a woman to look at her body and say it's wonderfully made. ;) 

But I happened to glance down at my Bible's footnotes this morning and I saw something I hadn't noticed before.  An alternate wording for the first half of the verse which reads:

I praise you, for I am fearfully set apart.

Fearfully set apart.  I am set apart.  When God made me, He set apart a discrete and limited consciousness inside a boundary of skin.  And there's very little I can do about that. Vulcan mind-melding is not on the horizon anytime soon.  And despite groupthink rumors, there has yet to be a Borg. I am set apart inside my own mind, and yes, sometimes it is quite fearful. 

Proverbs 14:10 The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.

No matter how close we get to another person, no matter how intimate the relationship, there will always be depths within that are unknown. There will always be misunderstandings, secrets, or just passing thoughts that you never get around to sharing. Each one of us, whether married or single or parent or child or friend, ultimately walks through this world alone.  It sounds a bit depressing, but I think it's good to acknowledge the reality.  My husband loves me, but he can't get inside my head. (and he once told me adamantly that he doesn't want to! My mind frightens him! ;-D )  I can't get in his, either.  I used to expect marriage to make me feel like I was never alone, and I was VERY frustrated and disappointed that it wasn't working out that way.  Now I know it's part of the human condition.  I am fearfully set apart.

Why? Why would God make me this way?  Why set me apart in my own mind - my soul like a hamster caught in the wheel of my frantically spinning thoughts and emotions? (and occasionally suffering delusions that I am "Fully. Awesome!" )  Well, actually, He didn't.  He didn't design humans to be lonely - He designed us to be in relationship with Him. We were made fearfully set apart for Him - and we blew it through sin. 

So another fearful setting apart occurred.  Jesus was fearfully and wonderfully made in human flesh, knit together in His mother's womb, just like I was. Then He was fearfully set apart - fearfully torn apart- on the Cross.  And when God the Father turned His face away from Jesus as He bore all my sins, He was set apart in a loneliness infinitely more agonizing than any isolated human will ever feel. He was set apart...so that in Him I could be set apart.*

Ephesians 2:4-10 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, ⁵even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved— ⁶and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. ⁸For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, ⁹ not a result of works, so that no one may boast. ¹⁰For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Through Christ I have been fearfully set apart, through no merit of my own, to be God's.  God made me in my mother's womb and set me apart in a five-foot-two frame of feminity to be Jennifer.  Then He fearfully, wonderfully, and incomprehensibly set me apart again in Christ to be His own child and gave me work to do. And in the contemplation of that stunning truth, I can truly say:

Wonderful are His works! My soul knows it very well!

*note: I don't, of course, think Christ's life, death, and resurrection were only for me, though my sin alone was enough to nail Him to the cross.