Songs of Trust. (Sunday Thoughts Link Up #41)
PSALM 115:9-11
All you Israelites, trust in the Lord—
he is their help and shield.
10 House of Aaron, trust in the Lord—
he is their help and shield.
11 You who fear him, trust in the Lord—
he is their help and shield.
Trust is a delicate thing and precarious, like a magnolia blossom on the edge of a waterfall. It floats and drifts and sends its heady scent up into the mist. It’s beautiful, but it can get pulled under. Of course it can. It’s just a flower in the big wide river.
I talked about songs of sadness last week and today I want to talk about songs of trust. There are so many: hymns that make you lean forward in the singing, modern ballads that make you lift your hands and sway because you can just feel it–that magnolia trust blossoming.
But when you’re not in church and feeling it, when life is grim about the edges, trust doesn’t sway your body the same way. Kids are sick. Parents are sick. Jobs aren’t paying. People aren’t lifting their heads from their lives to look at you sufficiently. You feel like a ghost haunting another world. It’s hard to trust. The Israelites forgot as often as we do. They went off and made idols. They tried to fight the enemy on their own in their own ways and on their own time because they did not trust that help would come.
You know those extreme hikers who scrabble up the sheer faces of mountains? They actually have to jam their grapple hooks in the cliffside and set up a little plank to sleep. That’s their campout. Can you imagine trying to let yourself drift off on the precipice with the wind howling and whipping your clothes about you? I don’t even think I could make myself blink. But they do. They sleep. And they wake to the sunrise at eye level on a new day that will see them to their destination. They sleep because they trust those hooks. Those cords. Their own experience. They can rest.
I think we can rest too. I think we can hang over the abyss of all the badness and all the unknowns in life and still sleep. When I catch myself gasping, unable to unclench my hands on the rope, and feeling myself bruising all over with the effort, I find trust in hindsight. I sing with everyone else about how God delivered the Israelites over and over (eventually…never quick enough, in my mind). And then I flip back through my own pages and see how He delivered me from all the things I stared down in the dark of my own psyche.
Hindsight is the thing that keeps the blossom afloat. It’s what carries those songs of trust into the rest of life and keeps us swaying to the tune. It’s what lets us sleep at night, even on the cliff of our worries, because He is our “trust and shield.” God is good. God is good. God is good. He really is.
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
