Daily Devotion for December 16, 2005

Questions

 

Psalms 42 and 43
Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.  Psalms 42:11 and Psalm 43:5

 

I ask a lot of questions. I wonder, both aloud and quietly, about the meaning of things. Usually, I want to know small things like what an author or a person may be trying to say. Or perhaps, the meaning of a dream. I wonder about big things too, like the meaning of life. As with most of us, I have made a few discoveries here and there—a few brushes with the sacredness and beauty of life.

 

I have also known a similar despair to that knitted within Psalms 42 and 43. You see, asking big questions sometimes leaves big holes where the answers go. With or without knowing God, that can be a dark place. The psalmist’s questions are heartbreaking. However, they are cloaked and submerged in faithful devotion to God, a devotion that acts as a life preserver in the sometimes choppy waters of faith. His pleas hint that hope is laced in the rhythm of God’s devotion to us, our devotion to God, and our questioning despair, a familiar structure, created in heaven for a purpose. We who came later know that this rhythm of devotion and despair is part of the best story ever told. We know its end was also a beginning.

 

I wonder about my own level of devotion to God in such times. The author’s great faithfulness and devotion seems unmatched. The hope here is wedged in between the writer’s yearning for God, for deliverance, and for the “pouring out of soul” in pleading questions. Maybe the hope I see in these Psalms is tied to the energy required in asking painful questions or in asking questions out of pain. Even without the end of the psalmist’s story, I know light is just beyond the horizon, if only because the writer is so sure of God’s promise and because his yearning is so obvious.

 

So, in this season of hope, what are your questions?

 

Prayer
Lord help me to come to you in All that I do.  Help me look to you and your word for the answers to the questions I ask.  Help me to see that truth is contained in a person, Namely the Christ Child Jesus.  Amen

 

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