Psalm 145:7: What the Singing Is About

They celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness.

Psalm 145:7 (NIV)

What the Singing Is About

There’s a shop two doors down from a dry cleaner where a woman repairs umbrellas. Most of what crosses her counter can’t be repaired. The ribs snap at the joint, and once the joint is gone the frame is scrap, and she says so before she takes anyone’s money. People leave them with her all the same. A man brought a black one in last week with a bent shaft and a handle worn pale on one side, and he already knew what she was going to tell him, and he asked her to open it up anyway, and his voice did something on the word anyway.

A crowd is doing the telling in Psalm 145. They tell what God has done, the one praying means to add his own share of it, and the telling turns into song. They celebrate his abundant goodness. They sing about his righteousness, and the psalmist says what the Lord is like: gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.

They are singing about his character. His character held before any of them had a thing to report, and it will still be true after the reports stop coming. A crowd can sing that with empty hands and sing it accurately.

If nothing in your life came out right this year, do you still have a sentence about God?

I used to save this kind of singing for the stretches when I had something to report. There is a report in the psalm, and I still think it belongs there. I hear a crowd naming what God is like, and the works they tell about are how they learned it.

She opened it up, and the rib went at the joint in her hand, and she told him again what she had told him at the counter. He took the umbrella with him when he left. A man next door was arguing about whether a stain had come out, and she wiped down the bench with her thumb before she called the next name.