This morning's lectionary reading is Psalm 124.
Fifteen short verses. A song the pilgrims sang on the way up to Jerusalem.
It opens with a sentence twice — the psalmist says it, and then he says it again, as if he cannot get past it. If the Lord had not been on our side — let Israel say — if the Lord had not been on our side when men attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away (Psalm 124:1–5).
The whole psalm is a backward look.
It is sung after the danger has passed. After the army has retreated. After the floodwaters have gone down. The psalmist stands on dry ground and looks back at the water that almost took him, and the only sentence he can find is if the Lord had not been on our side.
There is a discipline in this psalm we have mostly forgotten.
It is the discipline of naming, after the fact, the rescues we did not see at the time.
You have them. I have them. We almost never count them. The conversation that was supposed to happen and did not. The accident that almost was. The job you did not get that, three years later, you saw clearly was not the one for you. The relationship that ended and felt like a wound at the time and now feels, in the long quiet of hindsight, like a deliverance. The version of yourself that was almost swept away in a particular year and somehow, by some grace you cannot fully explain, was not.
These do not show up on the news. They do not announce themselves. Most of the time we do not even register them. The torrent comes close and recedes and we move on, never quite catching that the ground we are standing on is, in some real sense, a gift.
The psalm is the practice of stopping and catching it.
Praise be to the Lord, who has not let us be torn by their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the fowler's snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth (Psalm 124:6–8).
That is the psalm in the rear-view mirror.
But I want to be honest with you, because if I am not, this article will lie to its reader.
Some of you reading this are not in the rear-view mirror. You are in the water. The flood has not gone down. The teeth have not yet released. The snare is still around your foot.
The psalm does not have an easy word for you. It is not, in its shape, a song for the middle of the trouble. It is a song for the other side. You cannot, in honesty, sing if the Lord had not been on our side while the wave is still over your head and you cannot see where the ground is. You can only sing that song from somewhere drier.
What the psalm offers you, if you are still in the water, is something quieter.
It tells you that other people have been here. It tells you that the same God who, on this particular Tuesday, feels distant has, in the long memory of his people, been the one who pulled them out. The psalm is sung by people who were once where you are. They did not know, in their water, that they would later stand on dry ground and write this song. They only knew the wave.
The dry ground came anyway.
I cannot promise you that your specific water will recede on a specific timeline. I have learned not to promise that. What the psalm promises is the shape of the story for the people of God. There has always been water. There has, again and again, been ground on the other side. And the saints who have stood on that ground have, again and again, looked back at the water and said the same sentence the psalmist could not stop saying.
If the Lord had not been on our side.
Maybe today the discipline for you is not to write the psalm. The water is too high.
Maybe today the discipline is just to remember that the psalm exists. That other people, after their own waters, were able to write it. And that whatever ground you reach, when you reach it, you will be able to write your own.
What rescues, in your life, might you one day look back on and see — that you cannot yet see today?
