He Takes Delight in Your Journey
What Psalm 37 says about the pressure of an unknown life
Do you feel the pressure of a life that feels unknown?
Maybe you're fresh out of college and the world that was supposed to open up in front of you just feels wide and directionless. Maybe you've started a family, you love them, but somewhere underneath the daily rhythm you're wondering if what you're doing is really what you were made for. Maybe you're on the other side of all that, the kids are gone, the chapter you spent decades building has quietly closed, and what you thought you had figured out simply isn't what you have anymore.
Maybe you just woke up this morning and couldn't name what's missing. Only that something is.
Me too. I've felt some of these things myself, and I'm still learning what to do with them. What follows is what's been helping me, and I hope it can encourage your heart.
I notice it most when the future feels uncertain. When that pressure shows up, I start performing. Not on a stage. In quieter ways. I start trying to look like I have a plan, like I've got a handle on things, like I'm not behind. I want people around me to see someone who has thought it through, who is not scrambling. And underneath that, if I'm honest, I'm doing the same thing toward God. Trying to make him proud. Trying to get his attention by getting it together. Trying to manufacture the kind of life that earns his delight.
I don't know how to relax with God. Not naturally. I know how to bring him my requests, confess my failures, ask for help. But to just be with him, unhurried, undefended, not explaining myself, not angling for his approval? That takes something I'm still learning. We become, most of us, performing court jester Christians. Reading the room. Working for the laugh. Never just sitting with the king as someone he actually likes.
And then I read this.
"The steps of a man are ordered by the Lord, who takes delight in his journey. Though he falls, he will not be abandoned, for the Lord is holding his hand." — Psalm 37:23-24
I don't know that I'd ever really stopped here before. But something in me slowed down when I read it this time, and I think that's the Spirit doing what he does, drawing your eye to something that was always there waiting for you.
God orders your steps. God holds your hand when you fall. But in between those two things, the part I keep skipping, is this: he takes delight in your journey. Not your arrival. Not your performance. Not the version of yourself you've been quietly working on so he'll finally be impressed. Your journey. The actual one, the uncertain, unfinished, sometimes stumbling one you're living right now.
He is not watching with his arms crossed, waiting.
He is watching the way you watch someone you love, present, interested, rooting for you in ways you probably can't feel right now. He knows every step before you take it and he is still delighted. Not because you've earned it but because you're his. And when you fall, which you will, he doesn't step back. He was already holding your hand before you went down.
And I know how easy it is to read that fall as confirmation of your worst fears about God. See, he didn't come through. Of course I stumbled, I always do. Maybe this is just who I am. We take the fall as evidence, as verdict, as proof that what we secretly suspected about ourselves and about God is true after all.
But the verse doesn't say he catches you before you fall. It says he holds your hand through it. He knows your frame. He knows you're dust. He knew you were going to fall before you took the step, and he didn't let go then either. His grace doesn't leave you alone on the ground to figure out how to get back up. He is there, still holding, still present, still the same Father he was before you went down.
The fall is not confirmation. It's just part of the journey he is already delighting in.
I've been preaching this to myself slowly this season. What keeps coming back to me isn't even the holding, as good as that is. It's the delight. That God looks at this uncertain, unfinished journey and calls it worth watching. I'm trying to learn how to believe that on a Tuesday.
So get up. Keep going. Like a kid who just fell on the soccer field, you dust yourself off and you run back out there, because your Father is in the stands and he is not disappointed. He is delighting in your journey and in who you are becoming. Keep holding his hand. Keep looking at his face. Keep trusting him with what you cannot see.
He has good things in store. We have no idea what they are, and that's okay, because he is a good Father and he has never once let us down. That's worth trusting today.
Learning to become who we already are in Him,
John Will
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it and even have a conversation!
