‘I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.’ [vs.1]
If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and change your…
…pace?
i won’t lie, i used to sing “face” as the last word of that popular Michael Jackson song, and i still do from time to time… but wot a great way to start a psalm and a day or week or year… echoing the ‘be still and know that I am God’ of psalm 46.10 which is coming up soon.
patience is a gift of the Spirit [galatians 5.22] and it is evidence of the God-Love mentioned in the well-known 1 corinthians 13 passage and in fact heads up the list… and in fact what i just noticed is that in both of those lists it comes just before ‘kindness’ – maybe it is suggesting you have to be patient before you can be kind [or maybe it’s just coincidence, but i guess in being patient i can demonstrate kindness so maybe there is a link]
but in the world of instant gratification – of microwaved meals and streaming videos, status updates and retweets, maybe patience has become a bit of a secret fruit or gift – a ‘the road less travelled’ aspect of God’s character…
because surely God has demonstrated His patience for me on many, many occasions for much length of time [and with it held loosely on to the Love, grace and forgiveness He freely offers me repeatedly] and so it would only seem fitting that i should return the favour…
altho even in waiting patiently for the Lord, He is still the one acting, or reacting and turning to me…
‘He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.
He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.’ [vs.2-3]
i have heard there are two rules to life:
[1] there is only one God
[2] it is not me
we get that right, and the whole world will be turned on its head…
as my friend Mugabe [no relation] Ratshikuni used to say, ‘If God is on the throne of your life, then you must be on the cross [luke 9.23] but if you are on the throne of your life [or anyone or anything else – money, time, possessions, music, sport, your special person, peoples’ opinion of you] then you have put Jesus back on the cross.’
i know we’ve barely touched the psalm, but i think that’s a good meditation for today. feel free to add your thoughts and musings…
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Hi Brett, I´m Telma from Brazil – thank you for writing about the Psalms, they have helped me towards my life. I have gone through a lot of stuff so I have been looking for Christian people, not only in my church but also on twitter which suggested you. Then I read your profile, [by the way, No_Bob is world famous and I still don´t know him? Who is he? Please, tell me more.] some of your tweets and especially your blog and liked them because you seem authentic.
When you shared about your experience with people dealing with their “junk”, I thought why not use spaces like this blog to reflect about Psalms and look at our lives with open mind or even better an open heart and share our junk with others?
I realized that a bunch of Christian people live in a perfect world, with a perfect marriage, perfect family, perfect children, job and I know that is not true, Christian people are afraid to deal with their junk because they want to be perfect in the presence of others and that is hypocrisy, arrogance.
So, I´d like to be the first person to share my junk here, saying that my marriage is totally broken which extends to verbal and physical aggression since I got pregnant, my son is 05 years old now and he is the kindest little person in the world, not because he is my son but because it is true.
After all of that, I began to hate my husband with a passion and of course destroying myself. I was thinking of give up on him and run away with my son, actually I´m living in a huge dilemma and I was feeling too bad with such hatred into my heart that I couldn´t even to talk to God or reading the Bible, then I realized I was wrong, [God had mercy on me, for sure] walking in a wrong way and when I read here: “there is only one God and it is not you” – I have decided to put all that junk in the hands of God and after that, I could see new perspectives and I regained my hope cos now I can see he is needing help, forgiveness. So I´m trying to get help in my church for both of us, hopefully he accepts help and come out of darkness.
So I think if all of us have in common the same God, the same holy book, why not take off our masks, to share our stuff and help each other? That is it.
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