Hope

Psalm 123 names the mockery of people who are comfortable, the kind that costs the mocker nothing and stays with you for weeks. A reflection on casual contempt, and the one thing the psalm asks for.

A song of promise sung by people whose lives had not changed in months. Israel walked into the sea still complaining, and the water held anyway. On the hope that speaks before you can feel it.

Psalm 121 begins with someone looking at the hills and not knowing where help will come from. If you have been scanning the horizon for a long time, the question is allowed to stand.

He fasted on the palace floor for a week on the strength of two words: who knows. Then the child died, and David washed his face and asked for bread. A reflection on 2 Samuel 12 for parents carrying a loss that nothing can change.

Jacob lay down in open country with a stone under his head, running and undeserving, and heaven opened over him while he slept. A reflection on Genesis 28 for anyone who could not feel God anywhere near in the season that hurt most.

Jonah called it the pit, the deep, the realm of the dead. Every name except the one that turned out to be true. A reflection on Jonah 2 for anyone held in a place that feels more like confinement than care.

Mephibosheth's name carries bosheth, the Hebrew word for shame. He answered to it for twenty years in hiding. Then a king said the name out loud and gave him a son's seat, without asking him to feel better first.

Scripture says three times that Mephibosheth was lame in both feet, and it saves the last time for the final line of the chapter, after he is already seated at the king's table. Nobody healed him. He was welcome anyway.

I said the words over communion hundreds of times before a wounded member gripped my hand and I finally heard them said to me. The Emmaus road on why you are not walking alone.