Psalm 51:12: Asking for the Wanting

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

Psalm 51:12 (NIV)

Asking for the Wanting

Trucks come up the hill loaded and go back down empty, and the man in the booth at the quarry scale writes both numbers. By seven he has put one of them in the wrong column and sent the truck out on it.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation. He is asking for a thing back, so he had it once, and what he had was gladness about being saved in particular — not about his circumstances, which were his own doing and were not improving. That is the first half and it is easy to read past. A man can be forgiven, know it, and feel nothing about it for a long while, and David does not treat that as a sign the forgiving didn’t take.

Then he asks God to restore it. Then he asks for a willing spirit, and he asks God to grant it, the way a man asks for bread. He’s praying for the wanting. A man in his position could have asked to be let off and stopped there, and instead he asks to be made willing. Everything he offers afterward, the teaching and the turning back of sinners, waits on God giving him that first.

Plenty of people get a hard week done on obedience with nothing behind it, and the week still counts, and the work is still the right work. David asks God for the part underneath all that. He had stopped being able to produce it on his own, and he says as much by asking for it instead. If the wanting is gone this morning, you’re allowed to ask for the wanting.

Ask plainly, the way he does, without dressing it up as a better attitude. A man who is also begging God not to send him away from his presence isn’t asking for a small thing when he asks God to change what he wants.

Up the hill the line of trucks runs back past the second turn. He does not want to make the call. He has wanted to make it less with every hour it has got later, and at ten past nine he picks up the phone and tells the yard what he did with the morning’s first load.