Dear Psalms friends,
Our focus psalm this Sunday, September 27, will be Psalm 57, an individual Davidic lament in a troubled time Let’s be asking ourselves, “How much weight, how much importance, does God actually have in my life, especially when I feel the earth shaking under my feet and my pulse quickening?”
Psalm 57 provided me ways to think and words to pray in what was then the most frightening and destabilizing time in my life, the years of the destruction of my first marriage, starting in my gut in January 1997 and ending in January 2004. I started the DivorceCare ministry at Christ Church in the summer of 2004. I used Psalm 57 to start every DivorceCare meeting for the next 5 years, until I handed off the leadership in 2009. I saw Psalm 57 minister comfort, confidence, and a renewed vision of the glory of God to many shattered people.
The time we are in now in the American church is reminding my gut of the destabilization I felt as I faced the reality of the death of my first marriage. It reminds me of being in “divorce-land,” the wilderness of a land of “smoke and mirrors” where truth was at first so difficult to discern because I needed a new pair of glasses. The glasses I needed were “God-focused” glasses, glasses that revealed my idolatry, my tendency to entrust myself to “authorities” (usually male) instead of radically trusting God Himself, no matter what.
So once again, I pray for God’s hesed (mercy/unfailing love) to hold me together and keep me focused on Him, his glory (kavod) over all the earth. When the Bible uses the word “glory” or “glorious with reference to the LORD, it is basically saying that he is the most important or preeminent person in this or any universe.
“How much weight, how much importance, does God actually have in my life, especially when I feel the earth shaking under my feet and my pulse quickening?”
Your Psalm 57 Sunday lesson will follow tomorrow.
To God be the glory,
Toni