Waiting

The psalm does not say heal first, then serve. It says sow while weeping, out to the field with wet eyes, into ground you cannot see producing anything. A reflection on Psalm 126 for the person doing faithful work in the middle of grief, before any harvest shows.

We treat suffering as a lobby between the life we had and the life that resumes when the pain clears. So we put ourselves on pause. Ecclesiastes says the season of weeping is not the corridor. It is the life.

You did not know you were living in the green grass. A reflection on missing someone, the grief no one brings casseroles for, and Psalm 88, the prayer that never turns toward the light.

The strength that carries us to eighty is the summit we are proud of, and Moses calls it trouble and sorrow. He does not ask for more days. He asks to count them. A reflection on why numbering our days is the way out, from Psalm 90:10 and 12.

You have tried to hope. The words landed flat. Psalm 71 reframes hope not as something you manufacture, but as something you bring empty hands to ask for. It is to keep reaching for it in the dark, to keep speaking to the God who gives it, even when your reaching closes on nothing.

You watched your children walk away and went home with no one to tell. No one lights a candle for a father quietly buried in broad daylight. Psalm 55 names the wound that comes from inside the circle of trust, and the door is not the kind that locks from only one side.

Everyone has a version of the wish: to be somewhere else, out, where none of it can reach you. David wanted wings to fly from the storm. On why the longing to flee is not a failure, and where rest is actually found.

For the parent shut out of a child's life, the splendor that overawes you is the other household, the table that looks whole without you. Psalm 49:16 refuses the verdict you read in its windows. Your child is still held.

Joseph stood just outside the frame so his son could stand at the centre. For the parent estranged from a child out of reach, his shadowed fatherhood becomes a language for love that stays faithful across distance. The child is still held.