Terror and trust. I think if we were more honest, or less well-adjusted, or if our egos never came into being, we might be overcome more often by these two emotions. A first glance at this world and perhaps terror is where we would land: we land there upon first entering it, pulled from the safe and warm wombs of our mothers: the first sound any of us made was a cry. And it does not take much effort to see the brokenness around us. Rather, it is a continual psychological exercise to ignore that brokenness, to ignore it for a time in toys and things, to escape it through television and video games, to drown it through alcohol. Even, we enter relationships sometimes simply for the thrill, for the refusal of the terror that is around us. Just before Christmas, I saw a story on the news of a three-year old who accidentally shot and killed his five-year old brother. I’ve thought about the terror in that family, of what Christmas was for them, of what demons that young boy will face as he grows.
I thought of how I didn’t want to hear that story. I didn’t want the terror, the brokenness right before going to bed.
In Psalm 56, the psalmist writes of this terror. Whether it was David or someone years later, we find the person in a similar spot. God had abandoned him. The walls of Jerusalem were broken down. The temple was burned to the ground. Or, David ran for his life: hunted in his homeland and hated in exile, acting mad to escape the Philistine king, trying only to buy a little time. This is the terror of Psalm 56, a terror I can not quite reconcile myself to, unless it was when Brooke lay on the hospital bed shaking, told that her heart might fail during surgery. Unless it is in those clear moments when I am overcome by who I am, by what this world is.
There are ways to confront this terror, and we do best to confront it directly. Sometimes, our stories will bring us to this edge of darkness, of terror—and if we are living great stories, this will happen again and again, because we will always reach for something beyond ourselves. This is the basis of terror: our fragility. We are not in control of this world however much we try to claim that we are. These moments of terror remind us. Whether our stories bring us to the precipice of terror regularly—as they did for David—or with infrequency—as they do for most Americans, we do well to reflect on our fragility. Our dependency. The idea that we are not in control to the extent we think we are.
We do well, because to the level of terror comes the level of trust. If we know what it is to fear greatly, then we shall know what it is to trust greatly. So it was with David, and so it is with this psalmist, whether David or not: By God, who word I praise, By the Lord, whose word I praise, By God in whom I confide, I shall not fear! What can mortal man do to me?
Perhaps another way to look at this world is in absolute wonder, and trust, like the baby moments after it has cried and now is safe with its mother again. I think of this when the mountain peaks are pink in the morning, when the wine is rich and the light is dim at the end of a full day, when I hide with Ellis in her little fort in the back yard, when Brooke and I take the time to stop all that we are doing and talk about what is closest to the centers of our hearts: hopes and fears and thoughts unknown until we speak them.
I think of that throwaway line in this psalm: May God throw them to the wrath of the peoples.
Prayers for God’s wrath are not simple pleas for vengeance, simple “eye for an eye.” They are pleas for God to act in history, to bring redemption to his people. They are please for justice and rightness, for the visions of Isaiah to become real. For Messiah. We must not forget than for an oppressed and suffering people, justice and love are the same. God acting within history, making the world right.
The psalmist knew both the terror and the trust. May we be people who know we are reliant upon a Creator—utterly reliant—despite the seeming material evidence to the contrary. May we live stories full of valor and courage, stories where we continually step beyond what we imagined, stories where everything might fall apart unless we trust a God who holds all together.
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