"1 Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to you. 2 Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress. Incline your ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call. 3 For my days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. 4 My heart is stricken and withered like grass; I am too wasted to eat my bread. 5 Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my skin. 6 I am like an owl of the wilderness, like a little owl of the waste places. 7 I lie awake; I am like a lonely bird on the housetop. 8 All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse. 9 For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink" (NRSV, for those who care).
Now, while by no means have I avoided nutritional sustenance lately, nor have I been eating any ashes, there was a sentiment here that I found myself aligning with. More for my own good, I have in mind to share with you some of my thoughts. Of course, as it often goes, the rest of the psalm wasn't particularly relatable to my own situation, so I'm not going to bother including that part. Instead, let me talk a little bit about this portion of this psalm.
First, it should be noted that the editor's explanation at the forefront of the psalm says "Prayer to the Eternal King for Help: A prayer of one afflicted, when faint and pleading before the Lord." Again, perhaps I can't say that I am technically afflicted, in that I'm not at death's door and I don't have any persecutors jeering outside my window at me, but I find myself, for a few different reasons at the moment, faint and pleading to God, both of them in a literal sense. I haven't slept well in weeks and weeks, so I'm exhausted, and I find myself in a stretch when I need to choose to trust God because if I got to choose the way things were, they certainly wouldn't be how they are, at least not 100%. Now, don't get me wrong: it's not that I think that needing to choose to trust God is a bad thing. We find ourselves in that situation fairly often, I'd say; it's just that sometimes it is hard asking myself 1) if I think God is worth trusting and 2) whether I wish God was at my personal command. The answers I come to are 1) yes and 2) no. Generally the process is not so concise or so clean, neither is it a painless process, but each time I find I haven't changed my mind. Part of the reason is that in retrospect I find that, even if I don't understand how this is true or exactly why the particular difficulty that was in my life was there, I do find that I know God did not abandon me and that even if my life isn't exactly as I would want, it is still fulfilling. Without that, I feel certain that at least one of the answers would change.
That being the backdrop, let's move to the passage. Verses 1 and 2 express something I know is common to us all: there are times in our lives when we just feel alone. We don't have anyone we can trust, or the people we trust can't help us, or the people around us just don't understand what we're going through, and as a result, we feel that God is not listening. We feel like the little kid in one of those cribs with the bars; God is in the next room, and if we would just cry loud and long enough, God will come take care of us. Obviously, we're imprisoned, so we can't go to God's room. Okay, so we're lonely and crying and mad. Good.
Add to that, verse 3. Time keeps whizzing by (sometimes crawling by), and nothing changes. Nothing of substance is memorable, and it doesn't seem to matter what we do, good or bad, it's like we never did anything at all. We work so hard that even our bones hurt, and still things drone on without any difference (or, sometimes things feel even worse. Isn't that terrible? You do what you know is the right thing to do, and things are more hopeless than before). So we're lonely, crying, mad and hopeless. Good times.
Moving on to bigger and better things? Not yet. Verse 4: Now our health is failing. We are so sick that our hearts can't keep up; they've pumped themselves dry. For the record, this has not happened to me in the literal sense, but as I think about what this is like for me, just the thought makes my chest tighten and I feel like I can't breathe. Yep, being so ill you can't eat the things you know will give you strength is pretty fun. Verses 5 and 6 carry something of the same idea: that basically we're wasting away, due to our circumstance, in both a literal and figurative sense. Lonely, crying, mad, hopeless, dying. Heap on some serious despair over facing the loneliness (verse 7), and who can even say how it can get worse? [Sidenote: isn't there something sadly beautiful about the picture of the lonely bird on the housetop? Even in the middle of the junkiness, the psalmist can still be artistic.]
Verse 8 is the thing that quite accurately adds insult to injury, as the saying goes. We're on our deathbed, and now people are saying mean things to and about us. They may be true things, and they may be false things, but when you're already exhausted as it is, neither one is easy to take. Hasn't this happened to you? People start saying what a jerk you are, they tell you they can't understand why they were ever your friend to begin with, or maybe you just think they're saying things like that. Even worse, maybe someone really has it in for you. One way or another, this is rather insulting.
Some context for verse 9: in Old Testament times, the appropriate thing to do in times of mourning was to tear one's clothes, wrap up one's body in burlap-textured cloth and wipe ashes over your whole body so no one will be fooled into thinking you're happy. That's what's going on here. So we're in mourning, but what do we mourn? The apparent death of God, or the nearing death of ourselves? It's tough to say. Neither one is a happy thought. (Well, actually, in the psalm, it's the latter, but I think there's room for another interpretation here.) Okay, let's recap: we're lonely, crying, mad, hopeless, dying, insulted, and mourning. This, my friends, is not a pretty picture.
Before I go any further, I need to say, just typing this stuff out has made me feel a little better, in and of itself. There is something awfully nice about knowing I can say or type what I feel and yet recognize that I am, physically, on the healthy side and, emotionally, fairly stable. I don't have confidence that this will always be true for me, nor do I want to be so callous as to ignore the fact that there are people for whom this is not the case. I just want to state for the record that I have a lot less to complain about than some. I feel that it would be ungrateful and unfair for me not to do that. That said, I can tell you truthfully that the last few weeks are weeks that, in general, I would be happy to trade away for one reason or another, provided that I can keep a couple of very precious and wonderful moments or hours in my possession. It is weeks like these that make me question my faith in God (again, I don't think that's unhealthy), my faith in other people, and my confidence in myself. At the end of these weeks, I can point to times that I did what I knew was right, and other times where I'm not so proud of myself. It's not so much that the ratio of one to the other during this time has been very different from other weeks, I just feel more aware of the times I am disappointed in myself. I can't say that there has been no outside impact that influenced me in my decision-making, but ultimately, what people say and do doesn't literally force me in one direction or another. The question I have to ask myself now, having acknowledged where I am, is this: What now?
I have a couple of different options. I can give up. I'm not going to lie, there is something that sounds really good about this. The areas in which I'd like to be selfish, to not care whether what I do affects anyone else, and to just do what seems like a good idea for the moment call me in this direction. I can think of a couple of really selfish things I'd like to do right now. I can give in. I can believe that all I have going for me is all of the things that I hear said about me, which don't feel overwhelmingly positive. Again, it's not that they're all untrue, but I guess I'm asking myself if I want to remain just the same in every way, or if I want to try to be the kind of person I know I can be. I can choose to believe God's words or not. Oh, man, is this rough. Do I want to call God a liar? Nope, I don't. But how can I wrestle with this stuff and not feel like I'm doing that? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know that God seems to think it's okay for me and anyone else to question some of the things that happen in life.
Before I started typing all of this out, I think I just thought I'd vent a little and be done. But as I've typed this out (it has taken me a long while, let me tell you), here are some things I've thought about.
1. There is a definite upward swing in this psalm (which I didn't share because I'm not there yet, myself), which leads me to consider the possibility that this psalm was written in two parts, one in the middle of a rough patch, and the other on the other side of it. I mean, isn't this how I generally think through this stuff? In the middle, it's difficult to foresee the moment when God enters the room to lift us out of the crib. And even after that happens, there are no guarantees that God isn't just calming us down so we can be put back in (ask any parent or childcare worker, and they'll tell you about a time they've done this), but that moment reassures us that we truly aren't alone. God really isn't dead, and God's not some callous jerk who doesn't care that we're crying.
2. If my enemies are going to be saying things about me, I'd better make it my business to figure out what's true and what isn't. Seriously. Leaving aside moral reasons for being obedient to truth and to God, I have to ask myself if I care enough, ethically, about the people around me to do what's right, even if it's hard. If I've been a jerk, I need to apologize and do what I can to fix it. If I haven't done anything wrong, then I need to hold my head up and "keep on keeping on", as my dad says, whether anyone praises me for it or not.
3. Philippians 4:12 is a pretty good comfort here: "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." Here the Apostle Paul isn't saying that everything is perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, Paul is saying that we have some really good times, and we have some pretty junky times in our lives, but (Paul follows this verse with a confirmation in verse 13) that the presence of God in times of rejoicing and mourning is what ultimately carries us through. Of course, this is a promise that, by nature, can't be redeemed if we don't believe either Paul or God, but I can point to a good deal of evidence in my life and others' lives that gives me reason to believe both of them. That to say, God is faithful, even when I don't see it.
4. I don't want to be in a position to order anyone around, God or human. The fact that I feel honored that God chooses to love me is something I would be loathe to give up. For that reason, why would I want to strip anyone else of that honor? If I like to be given the benefit of the doubt that I will do what I can to make someone else's life easier, why wouldn't God like to be given that same benefit? And if I am so mean as to boss someone around just so they do what I want, I can't see how it's exactly reasonable to expect that they'll like it. To be fair, I have to say that there are times that I do wish I could arrange things in a different way, make God intercede in a situation or make someone choose a particular direction in life, but isn't doing that (even just one time) a betrayal of the previous points I've made here?
So, again, what now? Is everything solved? Oh, no, it's not. Really, nothing is solved, but I feel better prepared for this state of limbo, of waiting things out and seeing where they go. Do I like it? No. That's not accurate to say. But am I willing to stick it out? Most definitely so. Am I going to try to do what is right? Yes. Might I be disappointed in some things along the way? Oh, yes, I might. Quite some combination of optimism and realism, huh?
Well guys, for those of you who've stuck it out, I applaud you. I think I've been more cryptic than I like, but let me assure you it is from necessity. Also, thank you for letting me write things out, even if it does you absolutely no good at all. Oh, and Happy New Year.
