How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
"Take refuge in the shadow of your wings" is borrowed from something small taking cover under something large — a bird gathering its young in close when danger is near. It's not a picture of distance or formality. It's a picture of proximity, of being tucked in close enough that whatever's coming has to get through the wing first.
Most of us picture God, if we picture anything, as somewhere far off — cosmic, abstract, hard to locate. This verse pictures something almost uncomfortably close: a shelter you'd have to be near enough to touch.
The psalmist calls this love "precious," not because it's rare in the sense of hard to find, but because of how much it's worth once you've actually needed the cover it offers. You don't have to have needed it yet to wonder whether it's real.
If the idea of a shelter close enough to actually reach sounds better than the distant God you might have pictured, that's worth a second look.
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.