"I praise you for I am wonderfully made" was the response we sang for the Psalm last Sunday. A friend of mine who is a cantor remarked that she found it a bit funny to be singing those words from Psalm 139. We are taught to be so humble, and here it seems as if we are bragging about ourselves! We are wonders though, and we should be aware of and grateful for that fact! Psalm 139 is a well known favorite. This section of it states:

You formed me in my inmost being;
you knit me in my mother's womb.
I praise you, so wonderfully you made me;
wonderful are your works!
My very self you knew;
my bones were not hidden from you,
When I was being made in secret,
fashioned as in the depths of the earth.
-Psalm 139:13-15

Psalm 139 has been set to music in such well-known hymns as "You Are Near" by Dan Schutte and "O God, You Search Me" by Bernadette Farrell. While both songs emphasize the fact that God created us and knew us in the womb, Farrell picks up this specific line, "For the wonder of who I am, I praise you." I have always loved that line in her song and wonder how often we do stop and thank God for the wonder of who we are. Do we really look at ourselves and marvel at the creation we are? Do we marvel at our role as co-creators with God in choosing the person we become, realizing what an awesome gift and responsibility that is? In many translations of the Bible, this line is translated as "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." There is another song that I have always loved by a Christian singer Rich Mullins that picks up this theme. In his song, "We Are Not as Strong as We Think We Are," he sings:

We are frail; we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Forged in the fires of human passion,
choking on the fumes of selfish rage.
And with these our hells and our heavens so few inches apart,
we must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are.

This is one of the things that amazes me about human creation; we seem to be so incredibly strong and so very frail at the same time. We have an unending ability to hurt one another. There is a great vulnerability in being human, and it seems the more human we become, the more vulnerable we are. And yet we have this incredible strength to endure. The song always reminds me that that strength to endure comes from God; that in realizing our dependence on God, we find our strength and our freedom. It is when we try to shoulder the world on our own that we run into trouble. It also reminds me of our need for one another. The irony of life is that we depend on the very people to whom we become the most vulnerable and who have the greatest power to hurt us.

For me, it all comes back to this incredible gift of human life we are given, and how we choose to use it. Are we living the lives that allow us to actualize our full potential as human beings? Are we enabling others to do the same? In moral theology the basic criterion for judging issues is whether or not a certain action or course of action leads to human flourishing. Do our lives enable others to flourish? Are we ourselves flourishing, and if not, is there something we can do to change that fact? We praise God for the wonder of who we are by living our lives in a way that allows us to be the creation God intended us to be! We are only given one life, are we truly appreciating it? There is a great line that I have been reflecting upon lately and will leave you with:

"I gave my life to become the person I am today.
Was it worth it?"
- One, Richard Bach