And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.”

Exodus 33:15 ESV

I don’t ask to be sent. I don’t ask for position. I ask to go with the Lord. “You choose. I’ll go if you go with me. Wherever you’re going, take me with you. Whatever You are doing, that’s what I want to be doing. Where you go, I go.”

I didn’t use to understand a prayer like that since I had the Holy Spirit in me. But the thinking ends up being backwards, more along the lines of: “Since God is always with me, where I go, He goes,” as if God were submitted to my will and not the other way around.

I know it is all too easy to make and act on my own plans, to think I know what needs to happen, or to work in my own strength.

The people were celebrating that the God who delivered them from Egypt was with them. He was not. Today, there are people celebrating God’s presence that isn’t there.