Snug As A Bug in a Rug!

“I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8).

When I was a child my family lived for several years in a house my father built in the cedar-breaks west of Duncanville, Texas.

Our house had four rooms: a small kitchen-dinette area, two bedrooms, one on either end of the house, and a "great room" with a large stone fireplace in which we burned two-foot-long cedar logs. The fireplace was the sole source of heat in the house and the place we gathered in the evening. It was the center of physical warmth in our home.

There were five people in our family: my father and mother; my sister, Pug; my cousin, Pally; and me. As I mentioned, we had only two bedrooms. My father and mother occupied one bedroom, my sister and Pally the other. I slept year-round on a screened-in porch with canvas screens that rolled down to the floor. Summers were delightful; winters were bitter cold.

"Poor child," you say, but I loved it. I can remember dashing from the warmth of our living room through the double-doors that opened onto the porch, tip-toeing across a frost-covered wooden plank floor in my bare feet, leaping into bed and burrowing under a great mountain of blankets. Then, though rain, hail, sleet and snow lashed our house and the wind howled through the eves like a pack of wolves, there in my "chamber blest," safe from the world “where the wild things are,” I snuggled down in sheltered rest. "Snug as a bug in a rug," my mother used to say. I doubt that any child ever felt so warm and secure.

Now I have the greater reality: God himself. He has become my shelter from the wintery storms that now encircle me. Now, ensconced in Him and enveloped in the warmth of his love, I’m "safe and secure from all alarms." Snug as a bug in a rug.

David Roper

12/13/17

Read: Ps 91:1-16