But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love; for you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble.
Psalm 59:16 (NIV)
Singing Before the Danger Passes
The washing machine finishes late, and you go down to move the load over. At that hour it gives your hands a job while the rest of the house sleeps and the thing you are afraid of is out there in the dark.
Saul sent men to watch David’s house in order to kill him, and the heading over Psalm 59 puts David in that house. They come back at evening, snarling like dogs, and they howl when they don’t get fed. They are still out there when he decides on the hour. In the middle of that David turns away from them. “But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love.” The psalm ends on the singing, and the night it was decided in is not over yet.
He names an hour for the song, and he names it while the night is still going. He picked it before he knew how the night would end, and the appointment holds whatever he feels at dawn.
The psalm outlasted him in the mouths of people who were never in any danger, and they carried the decision inside it forward. A refuge in times of trouble is a place you use while the trouble is going on, and David names one with the night only half over. It gives him one fixed point in a night that has nothing else fixed in it.
If this is a hard week, one choice is still open to you tonight. You can decide what you will say at six, and who you will say it to.
Fill the kettle before you go up and set it where you will see it first, so one thing in the house is already pointed at six o’clock.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, I have been putting off the morning because I don’t know what it will hold. I am setting the hour now anyway, before I know how this ends. Wake me at six with something true about you in my mouth, and hold me to it when I cannot feel a word of it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
