Suffering

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love. David does not promise to listen harder. He asks God to cause the hearing. It is the prayer of a believer who has nothing left to strain with.

Pentecost is famous for the loud miracle of tongues. There is a second language miracle of the same Spirit. He intercedes through wordless groans. The sigh is the prayer. You do not have to speak fluently to be heard.

Psalm 123 is for the believer worn down by the contempt of the comfortable. The rescue rarely looks like a parted sea. It arrives in micro-movements of the master's hand. Watch the hand.

You are in the middle. The aging parent. The work. The church. The friend who needs more than a text. The mathematics does not add up. You are not failing. The structure is impossible.

In Psalm 42, the psalmist repeats the same sentence three times in two psalms. Put your hope in God. The help is not the lifting of the flood. The help is the presence of the God who is with you in it.

Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. The psalmist's prayer is the prayer of an exhausted person. The help he needs is not at his level. He cannot, by his own effort, reach it. He needs to be led.

You have been waiting for the water to recede. Psalm 24 says the earth is founded on the seas. God does not wait for the chaos to evaporate before he builds. The ground was always meant to be built on the deep.

The lie of suffering tells you that your collapse is unique. You are on the train, or in the supermarket queue, and everyone else looks untouched. They are not. You are not alone in your boat.

You have taken from me friend and neighbour — darkness is my closest friend. Heman was not only in the dark. He was in the dark alone. The wound of being left is its own wound. Part four of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.