Psalm 103:4-5: Orders for Your Own Soul

who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

Psalm 103:4-5 (NIV)

Orders for Your Own Soul

Who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion. David’s talking to himself there. Praise the Lord, my soul, he begins, and then he tells that same soul to forget not all his benefits. It reads like a man giving instructions to a part of himself that has a record of being unreliable.

Then he says what to remember. Redemption from the pit. A crown of love and compassion. He’s putting those into his own soul’s keeping, the way you’d read a list back to a memory that keeps losing it, and none of it comes with a step to take first.

The pit in the Psalms is the grave, so redeeming a life out of it is a rescue with death in the picture. He redeems first, and the crown goes on a head already above ground. Being pulled out is one thing, and being crowned once you’re standing is another, and the materials named for this crown are love and compassion.

So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s closes the list. That one irritates me. I’d take another plain thing God did over a picture of a bird, and David didn’t ask me. He put it with the pit and the crown, and all of it is work already done.

There’s a woman who walks over the river bridge most Sunday mornings to a service she doesn’t believe a word of. The bridge has a chain-link fence on the walking side, and in December the water underneath goes the color of tea. She’s said as much, more than once, to the person who saves her a seat, and she comes anyway.

David tells his own inmost being what to keep hold of, on a morning when it isn’t cooperating. Who else was going to?