A Psalm of David. Hear my prayer, O LORD; give ear to my pleas for mercy! In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness! Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.
For the enemy has pursued my soul; he has crushed my life to the ground; he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me; my heart within me is appalled.
I remember the days of old; I meditate on all that you have done; I ponder the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Selah
Answer me quickly, O LORD! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.
Deliver me from my enemies, O LORD! I have fled to you for refuge! Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground! For your name's sake, O LORD, preserve my life!
In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble! And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant. Psalms 143:1-12
Just days ago, I was afforded an opportunity to visit with an old and cherished friend whom I have not seen in a few years. What a store of memories were brought back by that simple visit! My wedding, the births of my daughters, the birth of her son, days of long talks and open schedules, trips to the zoo... These are the memories of a life just beginning, a focusing of my efforts and the efforts of my husband into one and of the beginning of our journey as a family.
Not all the memories were happy ones, however, as both her life and mine have held their share of grief and pain, not the least of which is my friend's loss of her husband and the father of her handsome young son, a man I will call S. It is a loss that brings sorrow, for he is still alive and yet he is lost in the truest sense of the word-- lost in a dark valley of pain. He is a captive in chains made from links forged by others during his childhood. The heaviest burdens he carries, however, are those links forged by his own hands; heavy cords of despair that have caused him to flee all he has known, even changing his name in an effort to escape his bonds. This makes me weep, for I, too, have felt that pain. I know what it is like to suffer under the weight of my own bad decisions, to feel trapped inside a prison of flesh from which there really is no acceptable method of escape.
The loss of him pains my family, too, because he was my husband's best man and the one who gave my man a leg up in the business that now funds our homeschool and has provided me the ability to stay home and train my children as a full-time job. This man was a beloved friend, but we were young and at the time did not know the value of expressing love. His parting tore our hearts in addition to the fracturing of his family unit, but for years all of that emotion was swept aside in the business of raising and feeding our own family. Our friend, too, has been kept busy trying to provide for her son, working to raise and train him with the added burden of helping provide a relationship with his distant but interested father, and the years have crept silently up between us. It was good to reconnect; good to begin to sift those old memories.
As I have reflected on all that has passed and all the time in between, my mind drifts to ruminations of my life before Christ. For when we lived next door to S., even before my dear friend came into our lives, I was a captive in chains of my own making. I was a prisoner of my own poor decisions. I was in a dark and lonesome valley of suffering, and for the most part I had walked blithely into that valley fully embracing the moral norms of today, the "try before you buy" philosophy for dating and marriage and the sound-seeming advice of "follow your heart." The problem was that my heart was a mess, and so I was following an ever-fluctuating and fickle thread that led me unfailingly into deeper and deeper problems. It was here that I met S., pregnant and unwed and at the very bottom of the chasm into which my heart had led me.
It was not long after I met my husband and S. that he met the woman I now know as a friend, a woman who was soon to take pictures at my wedding, bail me out of a couple of medical disasters, and stick with us through her own tumultuous marriage, childbirth, and divorce. Somewhere in the chaos of our two lives, I picked up and read the Bible for myself with my first heartfelt prayer on my lips: "God, if You are there, You will have to make me believe because I don't." He did, and in the course of reading that wonderful Book I found myself often in tears asking Him why He would do this or that until suddenly one day I realized I had been talking with Him. Belief was no longer an issue, and over time He revealed more to me than I could ever have dreamed. But that is another story for another time. My friend's life and mine took paths that would seldom cross over the next few years, but during one of those crossings I had the great joy of sharing my faith with her and of seeing her begin to walk with the Lord in her own life journey.
Before I drop the thread of my past entirely, I would like to add an aside... It is more than a little ironic that I, who once rejected God and "religion" as being for the weak and simple, now find that fact to be utterly true. It was in trying to prove my strength that I found how pitiful it was; in trying to prove my wisdom that I found it, too, to be wispy and frail. God is for the weak--that is precisely the beauty of Him, for all of mankind is weaker than they like to believe. It takes one natural disaster, one vehicle accident, one fell disease, one bout with cancer or the like to rip through the armor of our strength and wealth and expose the small and fearful being trembling inside. But He came to save the weak, downtrodden, and brokenhearted and so our weakness is good news indeed! He came to give us, not only a new life, but His life--the very essence of life, the very substance of love. It is true: on my own I am fragile and powerless. In Christ alone am I strong; not of my own merit but His power working within me, making me new.
Today, as I look back,. my heart is full of fondness for my friend and for her young son and gratitude that, though several years slipped by in between visits, we can still come together as friends, and I look forward to the sharing and catching up that we will do in the future. I look forward to our children playing together and enjoying one another. And I pray... S. has recently reached out to my husband after a vast gulf of time during which we thought he had turned his back on us forever. Now my prayer is that my friend's patient compassion with him and his son's love for him will draw him. I pray that the tenuous and tentative contact he has made with my husband will develop into a renewal of friendship. Most earnestly, however, I pray that this man will find, as I did, that he is helpless before the relentless crush of time. I pray that he can recognize his inability to change the passing days and in his weakness he will finally and truly cry out and find that there is One strong enough to rescue him, One whose light will illuminate the darkest corner, One whose sacrifice was enough to pay the ransom for the most grievous misdeeds. I pray that he will find forgiveness, healing, and a new life as I once did. For in Christ, one can truly cast off the stains and grime of the past forever, putting on a fully changed, pristine new life in its stead.
If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared. I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope...
Psalms 130:3-5
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