March 14th

Psalm 69: 1-15

Through the Storm, Through the Night

Gospel songwriter Thomas A. Dorsey was out of town when his wife Nettie, who was expecting their first baby, died in childbirth.  ‘I buried Nettie and our little boy together in the same casket,’ Dorsey writes.  ‘Then I fell apart.  For days I closeted myself.  I felt that God had done me an injustice.  I didn’t want to serve him anymore or write gospel songs.’

Several days later, a friend took him to a music school.  Dorsey writes:

        My friend left me there in a room with a piano.  It was quiet; the late evening sun had crept through the curtained windows.  I sat down at the piano and my hands began to browse over the keys.  Something happened to me then.  I felt at peace.  I felt as though I could reach out and touch God.  I found myself playing a melody…and the words came into my head….

https://youtu.be/LsndecZOdbA – ‘Precious Lord, take my hand’

This psalm, an individual prayer for help, was important to the life of Israel but also to the Gospel writers.  After Psalms 22 and 110, it is the most quoted psalm in the New Testament.

Our psalmist begins in despair:

Save me, God,
    because the waters have reached my neck!
² I have sunk into deep mud.
    My feet can’t touch the bottom!
I have entered deep water;
    the flood has swept me up.
³ I am tired of crying.
    My throat is hoarse.
    My eyes are exhausted with waiting for my God.

The psalm is believed to have been written during the time of exile but the expression of despair is common to many people in the OT.  Think of Jeremiah opposed by the kings and other priests:

Why is my pain unceasing,
   my wound incurable,
   refusing to be healed?
Truly, you [God] are to me like a deceitful brook,
   like waters that fail.

Or the writer of Lamentations:

God has made my teeth grind on gravel,
   and made me cower in ashes;
my soul is bereft of peace;
   I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, ‘Gone is my glory,
   and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’

Or the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53:                                                    

He was despised and rejected by others;
   a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
   he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Our psalmist recalls his total commitment to God and to the Temple, but people simply sneer at him for his devotion. 

He, however, refuses to stop praying.  With God’s faithful help, he will not be sink out of sight in the mire or by inundated by a flood of deep waters.

Whatever our crisis, like Thomas Dorsey, we can trust that though ‘Tired, weak and worn, through the storm, through the night, [God] will  ‘Lead me on to the light’ and lead us safely home.