A corner seems to be where two lines meet, but perhaps it is more.
My niece, who is visiting me for the summer, described a frustrated dream where she couldn’t see around a corner.
“I wanted to see, but I just couldn’t.”
It made me think about the insides of corners as opposed to their outsides. If you are outside the corner, as my niece was, you have no idea what is coming around the turning. If you are inside the corner, however, you are face to face with whatever is coming to meet you.
She and I sat inside our barn stall, and she taught me how to catch and milk goats. Here, we were inside where there was no guessing about what was around the corner. Here, everything was plain. We used the corner to catch the goat by the horns and then eased it up onto the stanchion to be milked.
David prayed this corner prayer: “Wonderously show Your steadfast love, O Savior of those who seek refuge from their adversaries at Your right hand.”
When we draw near to God’s right hand (let the reader be reminded that this is where Jesus is seated), we are inside the corner with Him so that He can show us something wonderful. He shows steadfast love to all who come inside His corner. This is hesed, the eternal lovingkindness of the Lord that cannot be taken away or lost. It is precisely the kind of love Paul had in mind when he penned, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?…[Nothing] will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
He is in our corner, so to speak.
Outside the corner, what does love look like?
I taught the story of the Passover and the Exodus recently to a group of children who had never heard it before. When I began to give God’s instructions: Kill the lamb. Take some of the blood. Eat the flesh, their faces betrayed their horror. This doesn’t look like love, they seemed to say. It was as if they had met God suddenly, around the outside of a corner, and His loving face so terrified them that His love became clouded by His blood.
They were more likely to run away from God than to try to get to the inside of the corner of His love.
Three of them rode their bikes to my house the next week. My dogs met them at the corner. Two ran. One continued fearlessly around the corner and up to the front door.
“Do you have pickles?” She was motivated to overcome terror by her love of pickle brine.
I laughed. Then, she told me about her two terrified friends around the outside of the corner. I put the dogs away and walked to meet them. When I rounded the corner instead of the teeth-baring dogs, the other two children cried out in happiness.
One of them said, “It’s you! I didn’t know you lived here!”
She had to meet a friend on the outside of the corner to be persuaded to see what was really on the inside. What had at first seemed terrifying, became a joyous celebration in which they ate every pickle I owned with great relish and fervor.
David, also, finished his prayer with the contented sigh of one at rest in God’s presence: “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of Your wings.”
God sent His Son Jesus, outside the corner, so that we would recognize the Friend of sinners and come to Him to be able to see and know His steadfast love, waiting just around the inside corner all this time.
Sarah Dixon Young 