Psalm 56:2-3: What David Wrote in Gath

My adversaries pursue me all day long; in their pride many are attacking me. When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.

Psalm 56:2-3 (NIV)

What David Wrote in Gath

The letters come about every ten days and they go to the council, not to her. She gets the copies. Two years of them now, in a shoebox on the shelf in the hall: the hedge, the bins, a smell in July, the hours she runs the washing machine, the car on the verge, the hedge again.

Every one gets investigated and closed. Then another comes. The one in March named a solicitor.

In Gath, in Philistine hands, with the title of the psalm saying so, David put down the sentence people carry around on cards. When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. He had reason. My adversaries pursue me all day long; in their pride many are attacking me. He says all day long three times over, and the pursuing runs the length of every one of them.

All day long they twist my words. They conspire, they lurk, they watch my steps. David keeps stacking them up, and every one of them is something being done to him, over and over, with no sign of stopping.

He puts his trust down while the pursuing is still going. He doesn’t wait for it to stop, and nothing in the psalm says it stopped. He was in the hands of the people he was afraid of when he wrote it, and Gath is not a place anyone gets to leave in the middle of a sentence.

I trust God the way I sign for a parcel, after I’ve looked in the box.

She still puts his bin back up his path on Thursdays, along with the two either side, because she’s the one who’s out there and it takes eleven seconds. Another envelope comes the week after. She reads it standing up and puts it in the box with the rest. Then she says his name to God, the way she has every week for two years, and she still hasn’t worked out what she’s asking him to do about it. Then she goes to work.