Day 2: Parched - Overwhelmed - Misjudged?

(Further thoughts on Ps 42&43 – taken from & inspired by John Goldingay’s, Songs from as Strange Land, (IVP 1978).
DAY TWO - Let it out...

I’m Parched (42:1-3)
We wait and wait and wait – for the breakthrough, for the experience, for the moment when God will at last come crashing in. We tire of staggering like people chasing mirages in the desert – ‘my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?’ We feel we are running on empty – like climbers (to switch metaphors) gasping at thin air on a high peak. It is exhausting.

I’m overwhelmed (42:6-7, 9-10)
The image is now of gushing and crashing waters – but they are neither thirst quenching or refreshing. These are the waters of chaos that engulf downing people. Everywhere we turn another wave seems to swamp us. Robert Harris in his latest novel describes a man ‘not so much out of his depth as no longer able to see the shore’ – we know that feeling. We cry, as the psalmists did with pain, anger and weariness, ‘Lord give me a break!’

I’m misjudged (43:1-2)
‘At first it was ‘I can’t get to God’ (42:1-2); then ‘God has forgotten me’ (42:9); now ‘God has abandoned me’ (43:2). We feel out on a limb, disconnected – we can’t do it ourselves and it’s not as we’d hoped. The pain & humiliation is all the more accute because we wonder if we have been fools – we could have understood our circumstances if we had thrown in the towel with God – but really we didn’t. The (unspoken) accusation of others, ‘Where is your God now?’ – is all the more cutting because we are asking ourselves the same question. Why? (42:9a) – Why? (42:9b) – Why? (43:2a) – Why? (43:2b)

‘The psalmist has his longings and his frustrations, his distress and his hurt, his resentment and his anger; he does not hide them.
And it is before God that he gives expression to them. This is not merely an emotional catharsis, like crying one’s heart out in an empty room, or losing one’s temper and taking it out on the cushions. It is more adult to say what one feels to the person one regards as responsible, and the psalmist is not afraid to do that. He does not hestiate to be quite straight with God. He assumes that God is big enough to take it and loving enough to asbsorb it.’