“David said about him: ‘I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.” Acts 2:25

God’s Omnipresence

I met a softball umpire recently who told me a story about his daughter being born without half of her heart.

He told me he could hear babies in the other room crying, full of life, while his daughter died right in front of him. In the havoc of it all, he heard Chris Rice’s song “Untitled Hymn” playing faintly on the radio in the hospital room.

He walked over and turned it up: And with your final heartbeat, Kiss the world goodbye, Then go in peace, and laugh on glory’s side.

“It was beautiful,” he told me. “She lived a life without any suffering.”

I didn’t even know what to say. He went on to tell me that he felt Jesus the whole time, when he heard the song, when he watched his daughter breathe her final breath, when he was walking through the hallway, and when he buried her.

It was a reminder to me that God is “at my right hand,” as Acts 2 states, and that because of his constant presence, “I will not be shaken.” 

And yet, in my trials that cannot compare to the intensity of the softball umpire.  I hear the him tell me, “Jesus was right there with me,” and I hear David’s whisper, “I will not be shaken.”

— STEPHEN COPELAND