Psalm 31: 7-8 NKJV:
I will be glad and rejoice in Your mercy,
For you have considered my trouble;
You have known my soul in adversities
And have not shut me up into the hand of the enemy;
You have set my feet in a wide place
What I love about Psalm 31 is that it, like many psalms, is a rollercoaster of praise and lament. The verse immediately following our scripture is, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble” (31:9), which seems counterintuitive to the message of the previous verses. Can David be so inconsistent? Why, in praising the Lord, does David not provide a more cohesive image of salvation from suffering?
As I reflect on my experience with Christ and my experience here at Bucknell, the flip-flopping of David’s psalm appears more and more a holistic interpretation of life rather than a fragmented one.
When I arrived at Bucknell in August of 2018, I had been saved for two months. During the summer between my undergraduate graduation and my entrance to Bucknell, my best friend convinced me to work at a Christian summer camp. I was to be a camp counselor. Leading bible study. Never mind the fact that I was terrified of kids and most decidedly agonistic. The fact of the matter was that I was broke, needed part time work, and, contrary to popular opinion, no one would hire me to cashier with an English degree. My options were slim, and the space I had to maneuver was narrow. Camp seemed like my only option, the barest toehold to push myself onto the next stage in life where I would be back to feeling comfortable in academics. I figured that the kids I could get used to, and the religion I could fake.
Camp ended up being a mercy not only to my bank account. After an uncomfortable initiation, I loved camp. My campers made me into a mentor. My co counselors made me into a better coworker and friend. God made me into a believer, which is a trite way of saying something so monumental I cannot fit it into ten minutes. I won’t try here, other than to say God had freed me from the net I’d wrapped around myself and set me on my feet.
I didn’t want to leave camp to go to Bucknell. I was secretly afraid that if I didn’t keep up with the rigor of dedicated prayer and community worship I’d experienced at camp, I would cease to feel God’s presence in my life. However, I told myself that, armed with my shiny new faith, I could make whatever place I entered into as spiritually fulfilling as camp had been.
But that’s not really what happened. My entrance into Bucknell was difficult, and I soon found I could not make the people here into the people I had known before. The walls of every building felt narrower by day. My apartment felt dark and gloomy. This was not the wide place I had anticipated.
Every weekend I went back to camp to work the retreat season, I realized more and more that it was not a matter of geography, that God does not live within borders or walls. This was the most frightening thing of all. When I was at camp, I felt on fire for God, ready to speak out in praise at the merest provocation. But that fire felt dimmer every day of my first semester. I thought that this was something I was doing wrong, that I wasn’t powerful enough to force God’s presence in my life the way I’d felt it before. In trying, I felt like, as the psalmist writes, a broken vessel, leaking faith from every puncture. I could not drag God to me, try as I might.
But I kept praying, although it often felt like playing Marco Polo in the dark. I expected, stubbornly, an answer, whenever it would come. It was only later that I realized that this stubborn prayer meant something greater. That, in knowing God, I did not have to drag Him to me, but that He was always there when I called out. That He was always with me and around me. That God occupies every space, narrow or wide.
In the past year, my life has overflowed with blessings. And each of those blessings has come with its own kind of distress. The future is full of opportunity and struggle, and although God sees all that I cannot, I will only experience each of them in turn. David writes in verse 22, “For I said in my haste,/’I am cut off from before Your eyes’;/Nevertheless You heard the voice of my supplications/When I cried out to you.” Whether our lives are pleasant or we are struggling, our sights are often narrow. We can’t help but to see the path as our feet tread it. But God sees beyond the now. He sees every space we are to traverse. He knows that the world He has made is wide.
Amen.
NEVER quit moving. Succeed!