Psalms of Trust for Easter Sunday

Praying with the Psalmists, Psalms of Trust 0

Bluebells

Christ is Risen!

I had a lovely Easter Sunday – sang in the choir for two services, where we invite folks from the congregation to join us in singing the Hallelujah Chorus, with orchestral accompaniment. The 11:00 service especially had many voices raised and was magnificent. Then I had Easter dinner with a dear friend since childhood and her family – and got some much-needed Mom hugs from her Mom besides.

Since I’ve been doing the Laments for Lent series, I wanted to do a follow-up on Easter. Instead of looking at Laments, I want to look at two Psalms of Trust.

Psalms of Trust don’t have a particular form like the Lament, but they do have seven Key Concepts that show up (not all of them in all Psalms of Trust, but definite themes):

• Trust
• Refuge
• No Fear
• Vindication
• Guidance
• Deliverance
• Faithfulness

Since it’s already been a long day, I think I will just type out these two Psalms of Trust related to Easter. But as always, let me recommend that you try following the example of the psalmists and try praying to God using these themes as a jumping-off point.

Psalm 31 is the other Psalm Jesus quoted on the cross with the words, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Here’s the rest of this beautiful Psalm:

Psalm 31–

In you, LORD, I have taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
deliver me in your righteousness.
Turn your ear to me,
come quickly to my rescue;
be my rock of refuge,
a strong fortress to save me.
Since you are my rock and my fortress,
for the sake of your name lead and guide me.
Keep me free from the trap that is set for me,
for you are my refuge.
Into your hands I commit my spirit;
deliver me, LORD, my faithful God.
I hate those who cling to worthless idols;
as for me, I trust in the LORD.
I will be glad and rejoice in your love,
for you saw my affliction
and knew the anguish of my soul.
You have not given me into the hands of the enemy
but have set my feet in a spacious place.
Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and my body with grief.
My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
and my bones grow weak.
Because of all my enemies,
I am the utter contempt of my neighbors
and an object of dread to my closest friends –
those who see me on the street flee from me.
I am forgotten by them as though I were dead;
I have become like broken pottery.
For I hear many whispering,
“Terror on every side!”
They conspire against me
and plot to take my life.
But I trust in you, LORD;
I say, “You are my God.”
My times are in your hands;
deliver me from the hands of my enemies,
from those who pursue me.
Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.
Let me not be put to shame, LORD,
for I have cried out to you;
but let the wicked be put to shame
and be silent in the realm of the dead.
Let their lying lips be silenced,
for with pride and contempt
they speak arrogantly against the righteous.
How abundant are the good things
that you have stored up for those who fear you,
that you bestow in the sight of all,
on those who take refuge in you.
In the shelter of your presence you hide them
from all human intrigues;
you keep them safe in your dwelling
from accusing tongues.
Praise be to the LORD,
for he showed me the wonders of his love
when I was in a city under siege.
In my alarm I said,
“I am cut off from your sight!”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help.
Love the LORD, all his faithful people!
The LORD preserves those who are true to him,
but the proud he pays back in full.
Be strong and take heart,
all you who hope in the LORD.

And another Psalm of Trust seems appropriate for Easter. Peter quoted Psalm 16 in his Pentecost sermon of Acts 2, explaining that death could not keep its hold on Christ. Let’s look at that entire Psalm.

Psalm 16–

Keep me safe, my God,
for in you I take refuge.
I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord;
apart from you I have no good thing.”
I say of the holy people who are in the land,
“They are the noble ones in whom is all my delight.”
Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more.
I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods
or take up their names on my lips.
LORD, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.
I will praise the LORD who counsels me;
even at night my heart instructs me.
I keep my eyes always on the LORD.
With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithful one see decay.
You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

There – I don’t know about you, but those words help me refocus in troubled times.

In fact, I changed my mind. Let me try writing my own very short Psalm of Trust after all. Because whatever happens, I want to remember that God is my refuge.

A Psalm of Trust for Easter

Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Christ is the King of kings
and Lord of lords,
who shall reign for ever and ever.
Hallelujah!

Lord, I was reminded today
that Mary’s mind couldn’t process the empty tomb
until you said her name.
The Resurrection was the great reversal,
turning what seemed like utter defeat
into triumph and joy.

And you, Resurrected Christ,
Lord of life,
are our refuge and strength.

Our circumstances seem bad,
the news seems dire,
our livelihoods aren’t secure,
the future feels ominous,
and it’s hard to know where to turn
and what to do.

But Lord God, may we remember
that you are our refuge.
May we look to follow Christ,
loving our neighbors
and being kind to the least of these.

And may we remember that even the grave is not the end of the story,
for you are the Resurrection and the Life.

A Psalm of Trust after Small Disasters

Praying with the Psalmists, Psalms of Trust 0

When I say “small” disasters in the title, I really do mean small. Nothing life-threatening. But you know how after a series of things go wrong, you start to expect things to go wrong? I want to do some resetting and remember that I trust God to protect me from actual disasters.

Let me grumble first about the series of small disasters.

It began over a year ago in the middle of the night when I heard a crash that I honestly thought was something crashing through the wall of my house. It turned out to be that a closet shelf had collapsed, with too much weight on one side, it had ripped out of the wall. Or that’s what I thought was the problem. I eventually moved all my clothes out of that closet, unsure what to do.

A couple weeks later, I stepped into my bathroom on a Saturday morning — into a puddle of water. There was water dripping from my ceiling. Long story short, it was from a leak behind the shower in the condo above me — and it was also going into that very same closet. The shelf had probably given way because the wall was wet. The good part was that I’d already taken almost all my clothes out. And my insurance gave me a new bathroom (they’d torn down the ceiling) and put the closet shelf back up. Of course, I had to reorganize everything in both my closets so as not to put so much weight on the shelf. And pay the $500 deductible.

The next water adventure was about a month later – when a storm with wind in an unusual direction had water pouring into my bedroom from the window. And water dripping in from my office window. I ended up getting new windows for both those rooms for thousands of dollars.

And the rest of the mini-disasters were mostly financial. Was told I needed two new dental crowns, $600 each. Switched from a CPAP machine to a dental device for $900. Need new glasses $700. (I know, I should have found a way to get them cheaper, but they’re progressives.) And there was more that I’ve forgotten.

Then there were the medical things. Got hit with vertigo that sent me to the hospital to be sure it wasn’t another stroke. It wasn’t, but the dizziness lasted two months. My eye disease (Fuch’s Dystrophy) has gotten worse, and I may need surgery. I was diagnosed with prediabetes. My blood pressure is high. My two big toenails have been messed up since I went on a super steep hike in Maui a year and a half ago, and I was told they need to come off so that the new nails will grow in correctly. Turns out, that hurts. Will they heal in time to do lots of hiking on my upcoming trip?

They’re all stupid little things — but if I don’t pay attention, they can all build up to worrying and fretting.

I’m going to go on a 60th birthday trip to Germany next week, and it’s easy to fret about details for that, too.

So I want to pause, take a deep breath, and pray a psalm of Trust.

I have written a book about Psalms (still seeking a publisher) and the key concepts in Psalms of Trust are:

• Trust
• Refuge
• No Fear
• Vindication
• Guidance
• Deliverance
• Faithfulness

So let me pray one now. As always, I offer these examples partly to encourage people that they don’t have to be very good! I think I’ll use Psalm 27 as my model.

A Psalm for Carrying On after Small Disasters

Lord, you are my castle –
Why should I worry?
You are my provision –
Why should I fret?

When my plans crumble before my eyes,
when the walls of my home don’t do their job,
you give me strength to deal with it,
help to carry on.
You bring the right professionals into my path
and supply what I need.

Father, I didn’t want to deal with those things;
my first reaction is always catastrophic,
but again and again, you bring me through.
You help me take the problem piece by piece
and come to a solution.

Lord, I trust you.
Your love and faithfulness are eternal.
I’ve come through disasters before,
and you’re not going to abandon me now.

I don’t want to be thinking about the difficult details –
those will all get taken care of.
Help me see past them to the joy
of blooming irises,
of a great blue heron,
of silly posing turtles,
of bright blue skies and white puffy clouds.

And a birthday coming up, going back to a place I loved,
reminding me that you have been faithful in my life for sixty years.

Thank you — the disasters are small
because you are big.

I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.

Thoughts on Trust and Shame

Musings, Praying with the Psalmists, Psalms of Trust 0
Sunset behind clouds off the Oregon coast.
Just a pretty picture from my recent Oregon vacation.

Several seemingly disparate things came together this weekend, and they all got me thinking about Trust – and Shame.

1) First, before the weekend, I’d been thinking it was time to write another blog post about Psalms.

I’ve written a book called Praying with the Psalmists, and I’m trying to find an agent and/or publisher. In the book, I show people ten types of Psalms and how we can write our own psalms for prayer.

I’d love to end up with a website where people can post the psalms they’ve written. So why not start with blog posts? I’m trying to increase my blogging in order to build a platform — and in my Praying with the Psalmists posts, I would love for people to post their own psalms in the comments.

But now I’ve finished going through the book with my small group, so what type of psalm should I try to post? I decided my next post would be about Psalms of Trust.

I am going through a relatively stable time in my life. I don’t feel the need to write a lament. I don’t currently have a big deliverance story to put in a psalm of thanksgiving. However, I’m feeling a little unfocused, a little frustrated with the day-to-day trying to get things done and not getting enough sleep and having occasional odd health issues and just feeling a little out of sorts. So a psalm of trust might help me focus. (We’ll come back to this.)

2) Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post about the terrible AI-produced children’s book I mistakenly purchased for the library and had to take out of processing so that it would not go on library shelves. This weekend, it got lots of attention, because on Thursday Betsy Bird, a librarian who writes for School Library Journal read it and tweeted about it. She said, “It begins. Librarians, warn your selectors. AI is making its way into our libraries by sneaky means.
@Sonderbooks has the scoop:” I’m not talking going viral, but as of Sunday evening, her tweet linking to my blog post has 24.7K Views, 108 Likes, 62 Retweets, 17 Quotes, and 18 Bookmarks. Which is a lot more than my tweets usually get.

3) At the same time, I read a tweet on AskAubrey, whose Twitter feed I’m unduly fascinated with and always shows up at the top of my “For You” Tab, showing terrible posts by men on dating sites or Reddit. The one I saw Saturday morning was posted by a woman. Her husband is obviously cheating on her with the “friend” he’s “renting” a room to. But she still believes him that they are exclusive. People are mocking her cluelessness, and I felt compelled to respond like this:

Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I believed my ex-husband, too, when he told me he wasn’t having an affair with the woman he’d gone to watch movies with at midnight. He’s lying to you. You’re a trusting person, and he has exploited that. The shame is his.

By the next day, this tweet has gotten 14.5K Views, 158 Likes, and 2 Bookmarks. One reply said, “Glad I wasn’t the only one.”

4) Most of the responses to Betsy’s tweet have been positive. Well, aside from the shock and horror that such a book got published. But one library selector responded that this isn’t “sneaky” at all, and if we do an actual good job with collection development, we won’t let such things get past us.

And that response revived my shame.

But it also made me realize how the two popular tweets were similar.

In both cases, I should not have trusted, but I did.

In both cases, there were red flags, but I trusted anyway.

In both cases, I felt deep shame for trusting.

Let’s start with the trivial case: I ordered a truly terrible children’s nonfiction book about rabbits. It was masquerading as a series nonfiction book from a publisher that had more than 500 titles listed on our vendor’s website. But there were red flags, and I truly should not have ordered it. And I think of myself as a very good youth materials selector for the library – but trusting that particular publisher (“Bold Kids”) was a truly bad decision, it turned out. And I was deeply ashamed.

It took about a day for me to even talk about it. (It helped tremendously, I’m afraid, that another selector whom I respect fell for another one of their books at the same time.) But when I acknowledge that I am not perfect and I did, in fact, make a mistake — then my reaction is: Wait a second, who’s the one who should be ashamed here? “Bold Kids” is a scammer masquerading as a publishing company, and they are the ones who deserve the shame.

5) And that made me think of scammers on dating sites. When I first started trying online dating, I allowed a couple of men to email me off the site — and they turned out to be scammers. (Here are a couple of posts I wrote later about some tips for spotting them.)

When my friend helped me figure out one of those guys emailing me was a scammer, I hadn’t sent the scammer any money — but I felt very stupid and ashamed. And it left me feeling foolish for getting my hopes up. Did the scammers think I was so desperate that I’d fall for them? Who was I to think that anyone but a scammer would be interested in me?

So yes, even though they did not get my money, they did harm.

But going back to shame: Who should be ashamed of that? Not me! Shame on the scammers for preying on people’s trust.

And that brings me back to my ex-husband.

I was deeply ashamed when I found out he was actually having an affair.

But that’s backwards. Ashamed of trusting my husband?!?! He looked me in the eye and told me, “I’m not having an affair.” Twice!

We’d been married 18 years at the time, and I didn’t know of any reason not to trust him.

But I am not the one who should be ashamed. He is the one who should be ashamed of breaking my trust.

Now, I am the first to admit that I’m a naive and trusting person. That ties in with another thread:

6) I recently watched the “Shiny Happy People” documentary series and wrote a blog series in reaction, “Shiny Happy Childhood.” I think that authoritarian organizations like Bill Gothard’s seminars put lots of emphasis on trusting and obeying authority. I grew up in that, and I am a very trusting person.

However, I don’t believe that trust is a bad thing!

After all, I never intentionally lied to my ex-husband — so that’s a big part of why I didn’t suspect him of lying to me. I’ve grown up around a lot of good people, so I tend to think of people as good-hearted.

But it all depends on where you place your trust.

And when it turns out that we put our trust in a bad place, our first reaction is shame — when they are the one who should be ashamed.

7) As if those Twitter threads weren’t enough, yesterday morning I hit this daily reading in Melody Beattie’s book The Language of Letting Go, titled “Learning to Trust Again”:

Many of us have trust issues.

Some of us tried long and hard to trust untrustworthy people. Over and again, we believed lies and promises never to be kept. Some of us tried to trust people for the impossible; for instance, trusting a practicing alcoholic not to drink again.

Some of us trusted our Higher Power inappropriately. We trusted God to make other people do what we wanted, then felt betrayed when that didn’t work out….

[I for sure did that for years, praying that God would bring my husband back to me. I finally realized that I wasn’t really trusting God — I was telling God what should happen and gritting my teeth to believe it would, like a magic vending machine — instead of trusting that whatever God allowed to happen, God would be with me and would bring good even out of a bad situation.]

Most of us were taught, inappropriately, that we couldn’t trust ourselves.

The reading goes on to say that yes, we can learn to trust appropriately – trusting myself, God, and others. We are not foolish to trust, but we may need help with it.

8) And then today I was reading in Katie Porter’s book I Swear and saw this point in her “Guide to Consumer Protection”:

Never feel ashamed.
They cheated YOU! They are the bad guys. Would you report a burglary? It’s no different when a company rips you off. Expect them to make it right.

So Yes! I will resist being ashamed of falling for the scam that Bold Kids “publisher” is running. They are the ones who should be ashamed!

9) But coming back around to Psalms of Trust:

In my book, I put 21 Psalms in that category, so they are a big part of the Psalms. And one of the key concepts I found in the Psalms of Trust is Vindication. I used vindication as a positive way of saying the prayer that comes up again and again, “Let me not be put to shame.”

When we place our trust badly, the natural reaction is to feel shame.

And may I trust the Lord in such a way that I will not be ashamed. Because the Lord is good, and God’s love endures forever, and God’s faithfulness continues through all generations.

So, after all those musings, let me try to pray a short psalm of trust:

Lord my God, I trust in you;
let me not be put to shame.

Teach me to trust truly
rather than trying to control.

Take away my shame for being imperfect
and give me grace to warn others
and learn from my mistakes.

Grant me rest
as I trust that I am doing enough.

And I give you my endeavors:
My work at my dream job,
my writing,
my website,
my reading for award committees.

Let me trust that it’s not all up to me,
that you love me as the person you made me
and my value doesn’t come from what I do.

Amen.

There. A hodgepodge of thoughts about Trust and Shame. Does that bring up any thoughts for you? I’d love comments — don’t worry if they go off on tangents, because this sure did.

Psalm of Trust

Praying with the Psalmists, Psalms of Trust 0

I’m working on a book about Psalms, and using the forms found in the Book of Psalms to write your own prayers.

While I’m doing that, I’m writing my own example psalms. They aren’t meant to be very good, but they are meant to come from the heart. And to show that you can use the Psalms as an example for prayer.

The current chapter I’m working on is about Psalms of Trust, which is what I’m calling Psalms 7, 11, 16, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 31, 46, 57, 62, 63, 71, 91, 108, 121, 123, 125, 131, and 141. Those Psalms are beautiful and comforting, and I never was trying to match them. But in writing a psalm of trust in a difficult time, I tried to remind myself that I do trust God. When I ran out of things to say, I quoted a favorite Psalm of Trust to finish up.

Here’s my offering:

A Psalm for Perilous Times

Lord, you’ve always been the Rock in my life.
When everything around me falls apart,
you’re still there;
you’re firm ground beneath my feet.

I’m writing this during uncertain times.
We thought the pandemic would end months ago,
and now we’re afraid to hope it will ever end.
A presidential election is coming up
and we worry about conflict and fraud.
There are fires on the west coast,
hurricanes in the south.
My library is open,
but instead of welcoming patrons,
encouraging all to linger,
we kick them out after thirty minutes,
put our programs online,
and hide our faces behind masks.
We cringe when people don’t follow the rules
and hope they aren’t carrying disease.

Lord, we’re trying to protect ourselves,
and we’re trying to do our part.
But ultimately, we have to trust you to care for us,
We need your protection.
We trust in your care.

Lord, be my refuge and my rock,
whether or not I stay healthy,
no matter who wins the election,
no matter what disasters strike.

May I learn to be loving and faithful
like the one I follow.
And may I never think that my hope and security
rest in a certain outcome.

For you are with me, Lord.
You show me I have resources I never knew I had
and with your help I can withstand difficulties
I never thought I could handle.

I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.