Psalm 43

Send out your light and your truth;

let them lead me;

let them bring me to your holy hill

and to your dwelling!

Then I will go to the altar of God,

to God my exceeding joy,

and I will praise you with the lyre,

O God, my God.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my salvation and my God.

I cling tonight to the first phrase that I quoted, actually the third verse in this psalm: Sent out your light and your truth and let them lead me.

I am reminded of a Robert Frost poem, Birches, in which the poet writes about climbing up slender birch trees and swinging back down to the ground on them.  I have done this, as a younger child and man, and I would like to do it again.  In Colorado this would work quite well, I imagine, with aspens, rather than the birches of the northeast.  But, Frost says that he dreams of being such a swinger of birches, “when I’m weary of considerations,/ And life is too much like a pathless wood/ Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open.”  I think of this, tonight.  I would like to get away from the world for awhile by swinging on birches.  Or aspens.

I know that in most ways my life is easy and good.  I know that I have more to be thankful for than most people who live on this earth today or have ever lived on this earth.  Both materially and in the known commodity of love: I have a warm house and full refrigerator (we went shopping this afternoon) but even more I have a nuclear family that loves me, a wife that loves me and laughs with me, friends that are devoted to me.  

But my life still, oftentimes, feels like a pathless wood.  I feel that I am wandering among the birches and my face burns and my eye weeps.  Most of all, I am a wanderer.  As I wonder about The Gathering and where our community is going, as I think about my own career and life with Brooke, I feel I am wandering.  I want clarity.  I need light and truth to lead me.

Perhaps, tonight, I am where I should be, though.  Perhaps this state of wandering is exactly where God wants me.  Not as a punishment: I do not sense God’s judgment as I wander, as he judged the people of Israel.  But, I sense God’s timing and I see that many, many people who have walked in these woods before me have wandered.  The psalms are filled with David and other people who lived deeply and struggled deeply questioning God.  The disciples wandered as they slowly came to see who Jesus truly was, Jacob wandered as he ran from Esau, Abraham wandered into Canaan and did not know where he was going, Moses wandered into the desert after killing an Egyptian, Joseph wandered as he was sold into slavery.  Jesus, proverbially, wandered into the desert to be tested and wondered where God was on the cross.  

Perhaps life inherently means we wander.  I wander.  Perhaps life inherently means that I have to struggle, that I have to -- as I did today -- take time after lunch to right myself, time to pray because I suddenly felt a sense of being lost and confused and depressed.  Perhaps life is not a series of steps but a series of wanderings, a series of questioning: Why are you so downcast, O my soul?  Perhaps -- perhaps the deepest and truest prayer I can sometimes pray is: send out your light and truth and lead me.  

It is good to pray such prayers.  And, in some sense that I am increasingly reliant on God and increasingly stretched and increasingly longing for more of Him: it is good to wander.

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