In reflecting on Psalm 2, we were reminded in the absurdity of trying to gain control of our worlds by sacrificing sleep.  In Psalm 3, we see this lived out.  The psalmist states:

5 I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the LORD sustains me. 6 I am not afraid of ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.

The psalmist, after taking note of all the enemies assembled against him, surrounding him, places himself in the most vulnerable human state. He goes to sleep.  If any situation would call for a stop-at-nothing workaholic approach, it would seem that being the target of the hatred and vitriol of thousands would be such a scenario.  And yet the psalmist doesn’t try to fight his way out, he doesn’t even lose sleep over the furor arrayed outside his door.  He lays down.  From Genesis 1, we can gather a few things that are true of all humanity.

1. We are not God.  Seems like a no-brainer but I am always amazed how often I forget that simple fact.
2. A seemingly subtle fact that the Jewish people still recognize in the way they observe major holidays:  the days do not start or end with us.  There is evening and morning, each day begins when we cease from our work to spend time with family, to eat, to sleep.  Every day is a gift.
3. Every woman and man is made in the image of God, an icon, singularly shaped by God to reflect the beauty of our Creator.
4. We are creatures designed with the task of ruling and stewarding the creation of God.  The image of God is not simply a characteristic of being human it is a vocation to live into.
5. In all of this we are blessed by God.  As the old cliche goes, we are “blessed to be a blessing.”  God has lavished his love and attention upon us in order that we might live rightly in relationship with him in worship.  I think it no small detail that in Genesis 1, the work is the worship.
6. It all culminates in sabbath.  The Creator rests and all of creation joins him.  This is the Shalom, the world at peace joyfully ceding all that we would do to sustain us over to Creator, entrusting ourselves to God.

Returning to Psalm 3, the question for us today is where are our battles raging?  Notice the psalmist never downplays the very real threat that his enemies present.  If anything, he emphasizes just how strong they are to demonstrate that the stakes are nothing short of life and death.  What sorts of stress are you enduring at this moment?   Perhaps your enemies are surrounding you: pressures at work, bosses or coworkers who want to see you fail, financial troubles, marital strife.  This psalm tells us that the strongest thing we can possibly do, in response to these overwhelming forces, is simply to entrust ourselves to God.  Sabbath is not passive.  Sabbath is a form of radical resistance.

Questions for meditation:
Where do you feel the pressure to ignore rest?
What does rest look like to you—just as Sabbath is not passive, resting is not simple inaction, it is time attending to God and trusting that he sustains us.

Verse for meditation today:  Psalm 3v3-But you, O LORD, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.

Read Psalm 2.

With bleary eyes, I looked at my phone…3:34 AM.  For most of us, we understand that coded collection of numbers and letters as a disruption in our normal routines.  Perhaps it’s an expected interruption like the first few months of a baby’s life.  Maybe it’s anticipation or anxiety that is making sleep elusive.  For me, it was all of the above.  My family and I recently started down the path towards some major changes (more on that soon) and also recently welcomed our beautiful son to the world.  But I knew in that particular moment that it was not our boy that was keeping me awake.

Worry (I use this term intentionally because I am not describing clinical anxiety here) about the future is like being held captive.  Your captor is a master of human psychology and breaking human resolve.  He makes sure that you are constantly on the edge of exhaustion rushing into your room turning all the lights on and blaring unbearably loud noises and then leaving you in your panicked state.  Fear about tomorrow invades the deep watches of the night leaving us trying to play God from our beds.

“The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us'”(Psalm 2vv.3-4). The psalmist here describes kings who are attempting to establish their own sovereignty apart from the rule of God.  For them, the peaceful, just reign of God begins to feel like bonds and cords of slavery.   Psalm 2 is about nations conspiring against the rule of God.  But its also about the things that we plan and the things that we fear in God’s absence.

Often our response to the waking nightmares of worry is to plot our own course.  We use our imaginations to construct doomsday scenarios.  We believe the worst about tomorrow and thus the worst about God and begin to scheme every way we can to stockpile our own needs so we will no longer need to rely on the provision of God.

And yet in the midst of all our attempts to take the reins, to be yet captains of our own fate, heaven laughs.  Heaven laughs because there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.  Heaven laughs at the absurdity of our attempts to manage the affairs of the world from our beds.  Heaven laughs like a parent laughs when a child tells them there are monsters under the bed.  Heaven laughs because the Lord of all the universe loves us, is concerned with us and rejoices with us.

Verse to meditate on throughout the day:  Happy are all those who take refuge in him.

In Luke ch. 11, we are welcomed into the scene that truly encapsulates the way that we are formed to be more like Jesus.  Jesus’ disciples are with Jesus as he is praying.  Listening to Christ pray is like listening to Bach play the piano or watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel.  The disciples pray along by listening and then they beg of Jesus:  Lord teach us to pray (v. 2).

1.  Prayer Is An Innate Skill.  Large swaths of the evangelical church in America have done their congregants a great disservice in failing to foster this paradigm-shifitng request— “Lord teach us to pray”— in their congregants.  For many Christians in America, it is simply assumed by churches that you will automatically know how to pray.   The disciples sitting near Jesus as he prayed to his Father were no novices in prayer.  They were first century Jews who prayed the psalms throughout their daily lives and recited psalms and corporate prayers in the synagogue.  But something about Jesus’ prayer was still so foreign and novel to them that they knew the prayers they had learned and the prayers of Jesus were of a different character.  Their response asking for help is truly the first prayer:  we want to pray, Lord teach us how to pray.  Prayer is the language of the Kingdom of God.  It is not foreign in grammar or vocabulary but in content.

2.  I have to come up with the words to pray.  The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray.  He responds with his most famous prayer, the Lord’s prayer, and these words have been life-giving in prayer for the Church ever since.  But the reality is, Matthew 7 and Luke 11 are not the only places that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to pray.  The psalms immerse us in a school of prayer.  The psalms also run the entire range of the human condition from rapturous praise to hopeless abandonment and everywhere in between.  Consider the end of the lament longing for home in Psalm 137:  “O daughter Babylon, you devastator!  Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!  Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (vv.8-9).”  Are the psalms condoning violence against innocent children?  How could something like this be in the Bible about a God of love?  But those questions miss the point.  This psalm is not promoting violence in God or in humanity but transparency between the divine and women and men.  The psalms give us words for even our most base and heinous impulses because the psalms are shaping us towards a life that is fully alive to God.

3.  If I have to work at prayer it becomes a “work.”  The reason most people struggle so consistently with prayer is because they fail to embrace the struggle.   Jesus’ response to the disciples’ request, “Lord teach us to pray,” is a prayer for daily bread, for daily forgiveness, for daily strength to overcome the evil one.  There is not a prayer that will suffice for all of time.  We must see each day afresh in the grace and provision of God.  Think of your most valuable relationships.  It is likely that there was an ease, an instant connection that felt a lot like grace, that paved the way for the relationship at the beginning.  But that relationship has only strengthened and deepened to the extent that you both have invested in the relationship.  There is not less grace present in the relationship because you have worked at it over the years.  If anything, you have found more grace because of the work.  Prayer is like this because the grounds for all our work in prayer is the grace of Jesus.  Remember where we started in Luke ch. 11?  The disciples long to pray in response to hearing Jesus pray.  All of our work in prayer is a response to our listening in on the love shared between Father, Spirit, and Son.  We ask, “Lord teach us to pray,” in order to be immersed in the eternal love of the Trinity.

The Psalms literally stop us in our tracks.  We have been walking our own way, the way of the world, the way of the wicked (v. 1).  We have treated the world like a spectator sport where our sofa becomes the seat of judgment (v. 2).  The psalms are an invitation to know God and to know ourselves, and thus an invitation to pray.  Here in Psalm 1, we receive this invitation not as a list of things to do but as a cease and desist order.  Stop walking, stop standing, stop sitting. Stop talking and listen.  The law of the Lord is heeded only as it is received as a sabbath of hearing.

Hear the words of the Lord, hear how his ways are so different than the acquisitive, reductive ways of the world.  Hear and find joy.

The verbs for the righteous are deceptively passive:  delight, meditate, be planted.  I mean how do you delight in something?  Do you think about it really hard?  But this is the paradox of prayer.  Prayer is not first a speaking, but a hearing.  God’s initial speech in Genesis 1, “Let there be light,” bathes the whole of creation in the illuminating grace of God. It’s in response to the world-creating words of the Lord that we speak, that we pray.  Like babies copying the sounds and syllables of their parents, we learn to speak in listening. In hearing ourselves addressed by God, we can turn from the ways of sinners. We can repent. In hearing the Law of the Lord we are initiated into the customs and cultures of a new world. In hearing the Law of the Lord we are planted in the well-watered sunlight of the love of God.

Psalm 1 invites us to listen, to hear and to pray. Prayer is the grounds of grace, the fertile soil of new life where our lives stand tall in the love of God in every season.  Psalm 1 initiates us into the rhythms of the psalter, into living, real living.  Our lives are only truly alive when we are alive to God and thus the psalm 1 invites us to rest in the grace of God.

Verse for meditation:   They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper (v.3).

This site is dedicated to the tension of life- the dissonance between already and not yet, between eternal bliss and daily monotony, between the dignifying words of God and the dehumanizing slogans of life, between the suspiciously sacred and the supposedly secular.   Emily Dickinson, recluse prophetess-poet, was a master at weaving life and possibility out of this tension.  In her poem no. 5, the last stanza declares:

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

The Scriptures, the holy words recorded in Old and New Testament will be our prism as we allow them to refract the revelation of Father, Spirit, and Son into every corner of our world.  The Scriptures tell stories—stories about life, family, beauty, and loss.  These stories all coalesce into a single story of God revealing himself in the ordinary lives of women and men.  In this space, I will endeavor to follow a similar arc.  I want to invite you to see where all these disparate “parts” of our lives find congruence, living, moving, and having their being in Christ Jesus.   But mostly I pray that the one who spoke the creation into being will spark life in the very core of who you are, inviting you to find yourself addressed and embraced as a daughter, a son of God.