Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
A Psalm for It
My favorite psalm is Psalm 42, and I do not think that is an accident.
"As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God." (Psalm 42:1)
As the deer pants for the water, so the soul pants for God. That is not a psalm of arrival. It is a psalm of thirst. The man writing it is not describing a full cup but a dry mouth, and he is describing it while remembering how things used to be, how he once went up to the house of God with the sound of a festival crowd. He is not there anymore.
And then, twice, he turns and speaks directly to his own soul. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God. He is arguing with himself, out loud, on paper, in a hymn we have kept for three thousand years.
That is the whole reason the Psalter exists. There is a psalm for every condition a person will ever be in. The rage and the doubt, the guilt and the exhaustion, even the morning you did not want to be alive, it is all in there, and it is all in there on purpose. God saw to it that when you walked in on the worst day of your life, you would find that someone had already stood exactly where you are standing, and had left a flower for you to find. So do not face the dry season wordless. Go into the garden, find the psalm planted for your thirst, and let a man three thousand years dead teach your soul how to talk to itself again.