Gentle Reader,
Kate says: done.
Go.
I feel done with life today. It seems as if there is never a break from the swirling chaos, both on a macro and micro level. Something weird is always going on. It wears on the soul. Enough to make me think that the Desert Fathers and Mothers had it right. Just go hang in a cave somewhere and pray. Put on a camel-hair dress and scream into the wind, “Dishonor! Dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow!”
But then annoying Paul – yes, I call him annoying because he annoys me sometimes – tells me not to grow weary of doing good (Galatians 6:9). And I wish he was here in front of me right now so I could pull his beard and tell him that he doesn’t understand. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to not throw off restrains of civility and kindness. Everyone else is doing it.
Then I read this:
Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will declare what He has done for my soul.
– Psalm 66:16 (NKJV)
I wonder if the second wind I so often need to keep going is found in remembering what God has done for me.
The Thanksgiving Songs constitute the joyful reflex of the Prayer Songs, especially those for Deliverance From Accusation and Persecution, for here those cries have been heard. The terrible plights encountered in those prayers are now history. They surface here only to recount God’s faithful deliverance. Certain death and destruction (18:4-5), enemies and illness (30:1-2), a sense of forsakenness by God (22:1), sin and the terror of God’s anger (30:5; 32:3-4), and the scorn of it all (22:7-8) appear in testimony of the Lord’s saving answer. In every case he has made the day in which gladness appears (118:24). … The grand point of it all, as Psalm 52:9 puts it, is that these marvelous rescues are “what You [Yahweh] have done.”
He rescues me today by not allowing me to throw off the restrains of civility and kindness. I mean, I could. Free will and all. I really, really want to. I’d love to throw some verbal zingers. But it’s not what God wants. I can speak true words, strong words, but not hurtful words. No ad hominem for this lady.
So I sit and wait. It hurts. But He’s here.
Stop.
