My soul languishes for your salvation;
I hope in your word.
My eyes fail with watching for your promise;
I ask, "When will you comfort me?"
Sometimes we fret and fume when we are at a place where, for a while, we have to endure pain or suffering. We are distracted, our prayers are weakened, and we become a burden to our acquaintances (yet not our true friends). How much more trying must it be to have to live with pain? Not just for days or weeks, like most of us, but for years? I have several friends who suffer in this way. Month after month, year after year, they hurt, and they find it difficult to work, if they can work at all. The life of their family is reshaped around this suffering, from their rising in the morning, until (and if) they go to bed at night. Yet a knowledge of, and faith in, God’s word, his Torah, sustains even these struggling souls. If they can endure through the night with the hope that the day of God’s comfort, the hour of God’s blessing, will come, then surely God will bring it.
For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke,
yet I have not forgotten your statutes.
At first, we might think that to be such a wineskin means that we have been discarded, tossed into the fire like so much trash. Yet, this is probably not the meaning of the psalmist. There was a purpose for hanging a wineskin near the fire in ancient Israel; this served to mellow a wine in the warmer temperatures so as to make it into a finer beverage. Yes, the wineskin would blacken. Yes, the skin might even crack, but the fire transforms the contents into something marvelous, even as it mars the vessel through the experience. The scars of the saints may well explain the sublimity of their souls. If we can take this view of our sufferings, then perhaps we will be able to emerge, saying, “Yet I have not forgotten your statutes.”
How long must your servant endure?
When will you judge those who persecute me?
The arrogant have dug pitfalls for me;
they flout your law.
It is bad enough that we suffer in this world. Yet it is too often made worse by those who do not suffer, and who do not understand suffering. Those who treat us like pariahs, those who act as if there are not enough degrees of separation between us and them, as if our suffering were in some way contagious. Or does suffering tend to make us paranoid? If nature, and perhaps even our own body has turned against us, isn’t everybody else against us, too? Therefore it is absolutely necessary that we leave the judgment of those whom we perceive to persecute us in the hands of God. If they have flouted his law, then their pitfall shall surely catch them.
All your commandments are enduring;
I am persecuted without cause; help me!
They have almost made an end of me on earth;
but I have not forsaken your precepts.
In your steadfast love spare my life,
so that I may keep the decrees of your mouth.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. This is most particularly clear to us when we keep his words in our mouths day and night. May we choose to so honor God, whether our days are currently bringing us blessing or bane, pleasure or pain.
Grace and peace,
Ron
