You Are Gonna Stay With Me
The word for Saturday, August 29, 2026 is You Are Gonna Stay With Me.
The anchor verses are Psalm 23:5 and Psalm 23:1.
Rob Burnside had been working in education for thirty one years when he got a letter about one of his students.
He was the principal of a high school near Cincinnati. The letter said that a boy named Landerius Hayes, who everybody called DeDe, had to withdraw. His mother had moved outside the district boundary, and the district had ordered him to withdraw.
That letter was the first Burnside knew of any of it. Until then DeDe was one of the students he knew from the hallways. The paperwork told him where the boy was supposed to live. It did not tell him where the boy was actually sleeping.
What the letter did not say was that the boy was homeless. He could not safely live with his mother and he could not safely live with his father. Some nights he slept in a car with the heat running, because his father's mobile home got too cold to stay in.
He was hungry most of the time.
Burnside went back to the district. He asked for an explanation and then asked for an exception.
They told him no.
So he went home and talked to his wife Angel. They had already adopted two children. Angel's answer was immediate. They had a place for DeDe. With his mother's blessing, they brought him into their house, and Burnside kept letting him come to school.
Then DeDe offered to leave.
DeDe told him he would go live with his mother so that Burnside would not lose his job. A teenager who had been sleeping in a car offered to go back to it so that the adult would not have to pay for helping him.
Burnside gave him his answer.
No. You are gonna stay with me.
And then: DeDe, you are part of this family. We are not gonna turn our back on you.
The district investigated him. They put him on leave. Then they handed him a letter with two options on it, resign or be terminated, and he resigned.
He and Angel became the boy's legal guardians, which gave DeDe a stable home and allowed him to enroll in school again. DeDe graduated this past May from a different high school with both of them sitting in the stands. He calls them Pops and Ma now. He is training to be an aviation mechanic.
Burnside has not been able to get another principal job in that area. He says he has no regrets.
DeDe remembers the cold car, the hunger, the instability of school, and trying to make it through.
Now he has a house. He gets to be a kid. And he eats.
Psalm 23 is one almost everybody knows and almost nobody reads all the way through.
It opens with a line people put on greeting cards.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Then it goes into a valley with the shadow of death in it. Verse five sets the next scene.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
The table is in a specific place.
Not afterward. Not once the enemies have gone home. The psalm leaves them present, and GOD prepares the table anyway.
David does not say the room has been cleared. GOD sets a place in the middle of what remains unresolved.
That was the shape of the Burnside house. The district dispute had not vanished. Burnside's job was at risk. Nothing about opening the door erased what DeDe had already lived through. And there was a boy at the table with food in front of him.
Most of us would rather have the enemies removed. We would like the situation fixed first and the meal afterward.
The psalm gives us another picture. The valley is still a valley. The enemies are still present. GOD comes into the unresolved thing and sets a place. Provision does not have to wait for resolution.
That image points toward Christ. GOD did not wait until the world was safe. HE came in the flesh, into an occupied country, into a family that had to run, into a life that ended on a Roman cross, and on the last night before that cross, with the man who would betray HIM sitting at the table, HE broke bread and passed it around.
The betrayer was in the room. HE served the meal anyway.
The shepherd in that psalm is not managing from a distance. HE walks through the valley with the sheep. HIS rod and staff are in HIS hand because the danger is real and the shepherd stays.
GOD does not promise presence only while presence is easy.
DeDe offered to leave so Burnside would not have to pay.
Burnside said stay.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has offered to disappear so somebody else does not have to pay.
- 🙏 To the one still eating at a table with the trouble sitting right there.
- 🙏 To the one who did the right thing and is still absorbing the cost.
- 🙏 To the one nobody has told they are part of the family.
Grace and Peace.