A New Day

 

This week we are playing whilst praying the Psalms.  I am inviting you to find places in each Psalm where there is a light and life, and your soul feels a spark of light.  Yesterday, I said, this may not always be easy.  And if you read Psalm 14, you might think, “Good Lord, who wrote this Psalm?  Grumpy Dwarf from Snow White?  This is about has happy as a Steven King novel.”  This is a psalm of lament and a prayer full of raw emotions.  These are the words of a person who is looking at the scoreboard of life and it reads, “Enemies ~ 110 points…Home Team negative 10 points.”  Not sure how you scored negative 10 points, but the point is that things have gone from bad to worse to oh my word, make it stop dear Lord!  I do find it fascinating that apparently humans in all times and places have sometimes concluded that they are living in the worst time ever.  That something in our brain wiring causes synapses to fire and I sound like my parents, “You think you had it bad!  Let me tell you about pain and struggle.”  Perhaps part of this is the human condition to compare and compete?  Part of this is that life has moments of hurt and there is no cure for being human (thanks to Kate Bowler for that phrase). 

Yesterday I said that sometimes we need to process the pain, release it, to make space for God to enter in and redeem the ache with a spark of light.  To be sure, this doesn’t happen instantaneously or automatically.  Like fruit slowly ripening on the vine, the Spirit moves at a different pace.  Perhaps you need to pray the first 6 verses of Psalm 14 several days in a row. 

And then you arrive at verse 7, “May a new day, a day of deliverance, come”.  Sometimes it is when we are at the end of our rope and we can no longer rely on our own salvation plans, that we must let go and let God’s embrace be our strength.  We need help, not in the form of another vacation or swipe of the credit card or fancy meal or new shirt or bottle of wine, we need deliverance from ourselves and the brokenness of this world.  This is a new day.  You have never experienced this day before.  What do you need deliverance from?  Who do you need deliverance from?  What would that look like?  How might you collaborate with God today in moving toward God’s name for you, which is always, “Beloved”?  May these questions provoke, evoke, and provide you with a sense of grace and love this day and this week. Amen.