I called to the LORD in distress; the LORD answered me with freedom. – Psalm 118:5
Depending on which translation you use, the verse may read differently. This is an alternate reading in my Bible. The more traditional and figurative version is something like “the Lord answered me and put me in a spacious place”. The Lord gave me room. The alternate is more literally the meaning and actually more poetic in English.
Distress means pressure. We feel things closing in on us. The hero has fallen into a trap. The trigger is tripped, and slowly, inexorably the walls of the room begin to press toward him. He is about to be crushed like a spider on a tile floor under a stiletto heel.
Though we often think of stress as a function of the modern, mechanized, high-tech world, stress is as old as mankind. The causes may have been different in 1009, B.C., but not the effects. A man with his back against the wall in ancient Israel felt about the same as the man today who cannot meet the demands placed on him by creditors, employers, friends, and family. It does not even matter that the cause is concrete -- a sword at one’s throat, for example – or more abstract like a loss of status or prestige, the same emotional reactions are generated.
When pressure comes it generates fear. Our body responds to all fears by dumping adrenaline into the system. It wants to fight the threat or flee from it. Often we are not able to deal with the causes of our stresses directly. Like the man trapped in the trick room, we see no avenue of escape, and the immediate threats to us are driven by some other, outside power to which we have no access. Our ancient somatic response not only does us no good, it makes the situation worse. We know by our physical reaction that we are afraid, and, consequently, we surmise that something truly disastrous or fatal is imminent. Forget payback, feedback can be a bitch.
The LORD is for me; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me? (Psalm 118:6)
We can break out of this cycle of stress and fear. The way out of that crushing environment is up. The vertical is open to us, and the broad expanse of heaven offers us all the room we need. In Christ, we have a place on high. And, as the song says, the Rock is between the hard place and you.
We can rise as on wings of prayer, ascend from our dungeon by the ladder of faith. I do not have the power to free myself, but when I call on Him, the Lord will answer me with freedom.
6 comments:
Thank you for this message of hope. It dovetails nicely with the one you recently wrote about psychic, soul, and the Spirit. See, I do read, but am not always able to formulate a comment!
That's cool. Glad you like it.
That's a good point. The persistent widow had been wronged in some respect -- probably some property or something of value had been stolen from her or taken by force. She had no other means of recovering what was rightly hers except to cry out for justice. It is very similar.
There's also kind of an almost humorous juxtaposition between the Psalmist who says, "I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?", and the unjust judge who "neither feared God nor respected man" -- yet the judge "feared" the annoyance of the little old lady's persistence.
Good point about the humorous juxtaposition, Mushroom! Unjust judges are noyt only gonna be judged justly, but they are the butt of jokes. ^)
This one could have been posted for me specifically, because it touches on my greatest failing, and recurring pitfall. Stress, and my badly damaged ability to cope with it. Yesterday was a shitty day.
I get real tempted to dump right now- spill out all the things that are causing me to sit here trying to contain another poisonous groundswell of anger. But dumping is just that- dumpimg.
I'm exhausted. I had to work a night shift last night- the most difficult one in the bunch. It's a punishing slog of raw grunt labor and it just kicked my ass. I got home too tired to even talk, and then didn't sleep for shit either. Like I said. I'm beat.
And here's the part that gets me. I recognize that anger, and a poor ability to cope with stress are serious problems for me. Always have been. And it seems like I do, or at least make an honest attempt to try and work on it. I pray for help with this crap every morning, and many many times during the day. I pray for the people who piss me off. I turn it over to God as best I can. But nothing changes. I have come to realize, that praying for help with what is essentially a mental health issue is much like praying for help with any physical ailment. Stories of miraculous healings aside, you can pray till you're blue in the face, but that (fill-in-blank) infirmity will be right there waiting for you when you're done. At best you can perhaps gain some perspective- yes this business is your personal cross to bear. God didn't exempt himself from it, after all. He came down here for a season to drive that point home for the rest of us. And on some level there is some comfort in that, but frankly it's- while not what they call cold comfort, it's uncomfortably cool. And again it leaves me with the feeling that I'm just not getting something here. anyway. I need another coffee.
JWM
Hey, John, I just got back in.
My job is not physical but there are times when I'm up for hours on end working on problems, and then I get hit with something else, because the next shift comes on, and I keep right on going. Our operations people shift in and out, but the engineers don't have a shift. If Ops at any of my sites have a problem, they just call me.
If I don't sleep to speak of for a day or two, I get mean. And the funny thing is, it doesn't seem to me so much that I'm tired but I know I'm mad. In the narrow channel of the software issue I'm concentrating on my rational mind will work fine, and all the time, I'm getting crazier and crazier.
Other than sleep, not much helps.
What I think would help me is if I could see God as being in control of all that is coming at me. If I could recognize the sovereignty of God in every trial and recognize His hand in it, then I could surrender to Him -- and at the same time surrender the burden of it to Him.
That sounds repetitious but it isn't. In Matthew 11:30, Jesus called us to give Him our burden, which is heavy, and receive His burden, which is light. He wants me to surrender to what He wants to give me and surrender to Him what I can't carry. I can carry His burden and He can carry mine.
The great hindrance is seeing the Lord behind and in all the stuff coming at me. That's where I am constantly stumbling.
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