It’s dark. You’re tired and scared. There’s something threatening going on outside. You’ve phoned your mum. And your brother. And your best friend. No-one is picking up. Your messages have been getting increasingly frantic. You’re almost embarrassed about the last one. ‘Please. I need you. Please call me back.’
That’s where David is at. He compares the feeling that God may not answer him to a kind of death.
I wonder if that’s part of the reason people get so angry about Christianity and faith. We tell them to cry out to God, to ask Him to respond to their needs. But that’s a bit like leaving frantic, somewhat embarrassing voicemail messages on the phone of someone you’ve never met, and trusting that they’ll check their messages and respond.
That kind of faith doesn’t come easily. In fact, I can’t see how you get it unless God gives it to you.
But one of the things prayer does is it helps realign us to the way things actually are – the way God sees things.
That’s another thing David is doing here. He lifts his hands towards God and it seems to trigger a remembrance that people use their hands to do awful things to each other. Which in turn triggers a thought about the good things God does: both grace and justice things.
And just like that, we’ve moved from fear to praise of a God who does hear, who does respond when we call out.
It’s easy to dwell on our fears about what might happen if God doesn’t come through the way we want. But generations of people all over the world have had a lived experience of God’s trustworthiness and mercy. He’s the shepherd with his hand on our head, giving us a scratch and saying, ‘I love you, sheep.’
Praise be to the Lord.
– Karyn Lochore