Establish the work of our hands

Psalm 90, Moses' song, has always tugged at my heart. It's the reflection of an old man, a tired man.

Today I pulled everything out of our kitchen cupboards, because the exterminators were coming to spray for roaches. This is a good thing, but it was like moving house. And I thought, frustrated, that every time I get things in order and feel like I have everything under control - like I did yesterday when the house was all sparkling clean and neat for Em's baby shower - that something came along and messed it up, and I was behind again.

But work is never done till you die, and even when you're about to die, like Moses was, you can still look at your work starting to unravel as soon as you stop actively keeping it up, and all you can do is commit it into the hands of the Lord. "Establish the work of our hands, oh Lord, establish the work of our hands." It is all so precious, everything you put your life's labor into, but you're never allowed to keep it and you're never allowed to stay. "That's the trouble with life, that they don't let you stay."

I wonder if the Lord wants even those of us in homes to always feel our essential homelessness. How nothing is really permanent here. Maybe the answer is in what another man of God, Rich Mullins, sang:

"but I'm home anywhere
if You are where I am."