Psalm 40:8: The Law You Know by Hand

I delight to do your will, my God. Yes, your law is within my heart.

Psalm 40:8 (WEB)

The Law You Know by Hand

The shutoff valve under a bathroom sink turns the wrong way the first time anybody tries it. A woman with two kids and nobody else to call found that out on a Saturday, lying on a folded towel with a video paused on her phone and her shoulder wedged against the cabinet door. When the same fitting started weeping in August, she went down on the towel without the phone.

Sacrifice and offering were not what God wanted from the man singing Psalm 40, and burnt offerings were not required of him. His ears have been opened instead. “Here I am, I have come,” he says. He goes on about wanting to do God’s will, with God’s law set down inside him, in the same place a person keeps what he actually wants.

Anybody can follow instructions with the page open in front of them. The man singing here is after something slower, and most people get to it the way she got to it, on the floor, more than once, with the video running for the first few tries. Nobody is born knowing which way the valve turns, and the learning takes longer than the telling. A person can read this verse for years before any of it feels like his own sentence.

Before the song is finished, this same man asks God not to withhold mercy from him, and only afterward says why. Troubles without number surround him. His sins have overtaken him and he cannot see, they are more than the hairs of his head, and his heart fails within him. He had God’s law in his heart and he was in over his head, and both of those were true of him on the same day. He asked before he explained, and he is not embarrassed about the order.

The wrench stays in the cabinet now, behind the cleaning bottles. When the fitting starts to drip, she is already down on the floor with her shoulder against the door.