Have you ever been alone? Or felt like you were?

In 2000, I found myself in a new town, taking a new job. I didn’t know anyone in the town except for the people that I worked with. By 2003, I had made some friends, but I was still struggling. I still felt alone.

To be honest, I was in my 20s, and I was struggling with my faith.

I knew I loved God, and that God was real, as was His Son. But after that, some things were muddy for me. My parents were raised in church, but I was not. And I was wondering where God was in my life. My spirit was restless. Something was missing.

Have you ever felt restless?

I thought I needed to “find God.”

Isn’t that what some pamphlets or road-side signs say, “Have you found Jesus?”

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I still remember a movie that came out in the early 2000s. It a comedy that starred Jim Carrey and Morgan Freeman called “Bruce Almighty.” If you haven’t seen the movie, let me set the scene.

Carrey is a broadcast journalist whose career is stalled when he is passed over for a promotion to his station’s coveted news anchor position. Carrey – as the journalist – has this over-inflated ego. When he doesn’t get the promotion that he believes he deserves, he believes that God is treating him poorly, or that maybe God is absent from his life.

But everything changes for Carrey’s character when he follows up on a call that he receives for what he believes is an interview. He reports to the address that is given to him by the caller and when he gets there, the building is an empty warehouse.

There’s no one there – except one man, a character played by Morgan Freeman.

Freeman is dressed like he is a maintenance man at the building, but quickly – I realized as I was watching – that Freeman is playing the part of God in the movie. Remember, this is Hollywood. They are taking some liberties with the story.

But, in the conversation that Freeman and Carrey have, Carrey realizes that “God” has been watching Carrey’s life unfold at every turn. Freeman shows Carrey this filing cabinet which contains Carrey’s life story.

Unable to believe what he’s seeing, Carrey asks Freeman, “Have you been spying on me?”

___

Well, yes, sort of.

That’s part of what God is telling us in this Psalm. Yes, He knows our every move.  This is true. But that is meant to be a Word of HOPE not a word of condemnation.

God is not trying to “catch us in the act” so that he can condemn us. No. As believers, we are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

But God wants us to know that we are NEVER alone.

God is, has been and will be a part of our lives. We do not have to “search” for him. He’s right here. God is inescapable. God is part of our lives. We do not worship a god who lives high in the clouds, watching us from a distance.

That’s what this Psalmist wants us to hear. God is with us. That’s what “Emmanuel” means – literally. God us with us. We may think that we are searching for God, but really that is the Holy Spirit speaking to us, letting us know that God – our Holy Father – is calling us to come home to Him.

Hear how the Psalm begins, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away, you search out my path and my lying down, and you are acquainted with all of my ways.” And then, the Psalmist asks, “Where can I go from Your spirit?”

The truth is, at times, knowing that God is so close, so personal can be unsettling. It makes us vulnerable. It means that there is nothing about who we are, about what we do, and how we treat others that is hidden from God. God knows us better than we know ourselves.

It is useless to try and hide.

In some ways, we can understand the response from the television journalist, played by Jim Carrey, in “Bruce Almighty.” It might feel like God is “spying.”

But again, the Psalmist helps us out. After being reassured that there is no where that we can go where God is not with us, the Psalmist tells us why.

God knows us so well because God made us.

Listen to verse 13 in Psalm 139, “For it was you who formed my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret…Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me when none of them yet existed.”

So yes, God knows us. God made us. God is with us.

There is no need to search for God. God is right here, living within us through the Holy Spirit.

All that is left for us is surrender.

Surrender to this truth.

The Psalmist KNOWS there is NO world where he exists apart from God. God is at the center of his existence. All that is left is surrender, praise and obedience.

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This makes me think of beloved author, C.S. Lewis.

Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898. When he was 9 years old, his mother died of cancer. The death of his mother shook Lewis and his family. He was raised in a boarding school, and by 15 years old, Lewis was an atheist.

As a grown man, Lewis would go into teaching and become a professor.

While teaching at university, Lewis’s closest friends were Christian authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton.

In his book, “Surprised by Joy,” he recounts how he came to faith – how he surrendered to the reality that God was present in his life all along.

In it, he writes, “You must picture me alone in that room at Oxford College, night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

God sought out Lewis. God had pursued him through Lewis’s closest friends. Lewis surrendered, and we know his name today because of the eloquent books – more than 30 in total – that he wrote about God and the Christian faith.

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This is how it is for us.

God made us. God knows us. God is with us. God is calling us, so that we may know Him. So that we may know that we are never truly alone. Never truly lost. And never truly without hope.

I pray that you know that today.