Psalm 12 - One A Week Psalm Project
One A Week Psalm Project
Psalm 12
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How are Psalms a call to prayer for you?
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The line between expectation and reality can be quite thin but very significant. Adaptability to life is important as life is rarely quite like we prepared for it. To always be wanting what ‘should have happened’ or what you planned for is to be unhappy without even trying. Instead we need to try to take advantage of the surprises of life and explore how we might engage with them. It might not be as we expected but we certainly won’t notice the opportunities it may present without being open to them.
We don’t ‘deserve’ the good things that happen. But we can be grateful, and thankful and then try to benefit others from our own good fortune. Good fortune is in many cases, the chance of happenstance. It is where and when we were born, who our family is and what does or does not happen to our health, if we happen to live in a natural disaster area or in one with war. And how we learn to approach life.
To think we are in a fortunate position only because we have worked hard is to think others are poor because they have not. It is difficult to remember the fine line between success and failure and acknowledge the luck of circumstance God has permitted in our lives.
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As a I wrote out this Psalm tonight, it struck me as very dramatic, poetic, and even quite teenagerish: “…the faithful have vanished from the human race. People all lie to their neighbours: their flattering lips speak with deception. May the Lord cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue that says, “We will triumph with our tongues; we own our lips – who is our master?”
I guess anything can sound teenagerish if you put on the right kind of tone but it did strike me as a bit over the top – us humans ‘putting on’ the oppression of our lives.
And yet in the next stanza, God speaks! And it is both dramatic and beautiful and poetic “Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the need, I will now arise,” says the Lord. “I will protect them from those who malign them.” And the words of the Lord are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times.
Are we constantly (often?) the young, selfish, moody, version of teenagers to the Lord, unable to comprehend the long-term effects of our actions on the future, unwilling to think of others unless forced to?
It got me thinking about the tone in which we read things. Once I had thought of this, it was difficult to read it a different way in my head. The tone we read in silently in our head surely effects how we interpret what we read.
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How do we grieve for the things we have not done, the things we cannot do?