Oh, how I love your law, the psalmist begins. In fact, it's all I think about, and now I'm so incredibly wise that I'm wiser than my teachers. GO LAW! (GO ME.) What, you hear a hum? That's just the sound of me radiating holiness. The hyperbole goes on this way for a while, and then in verse 105 we get the refrain echoing from the lips of practically every church camper and campus ministry devotee out there: "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."
(Cue the tambourine.)
But there's a reason to sing that loud and proud. Those words are beautiful and poetic: a little crystalline snippet of the light imagery that shines all throughout the Old and New Testaments. For where light is, there is life. And life is in God.
But it's not always easy for us to remember that, right? Sometimes when we touch that truth, it threatens to be erased by fear, and it can happen in the very next breath.
Case and point-- while verse 105 is a miniature poem, verse 106 is a cry of desperation: "I am deeply troubled; preserve my life, O Lord, according to your word."
So here's what I'm thinking as I read this psalm this morning, bouncing along as the words ricochet from overconfidence to wisdom to agony to gratitude: I love this portion because it so typifies the believing life. It contains all our strivings and all our failures and those get-back-on-the-horse attempts to get it right this time, though we are actually never going to accomplish that by ourselves. Any success is always going to be God's gift.
But, again: that's hard to remember. It is so much easier to see the ways we have failed, fallen short, screwed up and just been plain stupid. The worst part is that often, our intentions are good. They are great, in fact. Great just like... ice cream.
And they are great not just because ice cream is the main event. It is beautiful and delicious and important and big, but it's also a place for lessons to be learned.
The thing is, the learning isn't static.
It's never over, never one and done-- in fact, the longer I'm alive in this world the more I'm convinced that the basic lessons never stop repeating.
Life hands us an ice cream cone, and suddenly, we are six. And WE. LOVE. ICE CREAM!!! We are in fact SO EXCITED. We will NOT SETTLE DOWN. We want to EAT THE ICE CREAM NOWNOWNOW. But then, a thought: can we eat the cone first? So we turn the whole thing upside down and dump the main event all over the pavement. And stand there, staring at a sticky, melting mess. It's a metaphor for sin drawn straight from Ben & Jerry's.
But then along comes verse 116, which for me is the beating heart of it all: "Sustain me according to your promise, that I may live, and let me not be disappointed in my hope."
That gets it just about exactly right, I think, because that is a cry for help. We dropped the ice cream. We will always, in some way or another, drop the ice cream, but there's more ice cream, because maybe the ice cream is grace, which is freely gifted, and it's there where we hang our hope. Not on the law alone.
The law gives us the parameters within which we try to live our grubby little lives, and when we fail, grace dries our tears and sets us to rights with another chance at the cone we always dreamed of.
So we hope. And we keep going. And we mess up over and over and we are caught over and over, loved over and over, forgiven over and over. This believing life is hard and messy and sticky and sometimes so full of ache, but there are always, always chances to start over, often in the very next breath.
It's Psalms like these-- the messy ones-- that remind me who is in charge. Who scoops the ice cream. Who forgives. And no matter how overconfident or devastated we feel, if we can keep our eyes on that, we will be OK.
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