Psalm 122
November 27, 2022
Father, Son, Holy Spirit,
As you know, our life situations are tentative and changing, bringing good seasons and bad. Sometimes our circumstances are favorable and other times painful and hard. When things are going well, we forget you. When things are difficult, we want what you can do, but don’t really want you.
For some, neither pain nor joy are companions that we know anymore. We’ve numbed ourselves with various things for so long because life is just too real to deal with today. Frantically, we try to feel nothing at all.
For others our happiness lives in another time, we cling to memories of a past that probably never existed and a future that perhaps never will. The present is just too present.
Lord, the Holiday season has a way of bringing all of these things to the forefront: joy, pain, remembrance, hope, and the temptation to try to harness them ourselves and curate them to our liking. We think we know what we want. We think we know what we need. We’re like dogs chasing cars who give no thought to what they’d do if they actually caught one. Beneath our circumstances, deeper than our suffering, greater than our joy, is a call that has echoed since the beginning of time, one that we’ve fought so hard to drown out: “Come.”
As David writes in Psalm 122, let us go to the house of the Lord. Some come weary and others strong. Both are called to the house of the Lord. Not its walls nor its armies are Israel’s strength. The foundation of Jerusalem is an alter; a place of worship and rest. Lord, you made us for this: to be loved by you and to love you back; to be satisfied and not restless.
Lord, your rest doesn’t remove us from the world but changes us in the world. It reconnects us to the moment by moment union and dependence that Jesus experienced with you, Father. The rest that you offer and made us for is one that death can’t steal, and nothing in life can either. Yet we find ourselves regularly trying to give it away.
Lord, have mercy on us. Have patience with us. Burn in our hearts a passion for you. Give us what we really need even when we think we know better. Lord, we believe that you can do this, and in your kindness, help our unbelief.
And all God’s people said: Amen.