For great is your love toward me; you have delivered me from the depths, from the realm of the dead.
Psalm 86:13 (NIV)
Brought Up From the Depths
A young man learning to print asks about everything in the room. Why the fixer smells like that, why the timer clicks, what the numbers on the lens mean, whether the paper goes emulsion side up. The man teaching him has an answer for all of it and enjoys giving them.
Then the kid holds up a print of his grandfather and asks why it doesn’t look like him. Nobody says anything for a second. Then they go back to the numbers on the lens.
Psalm 86 is David asking God for an undivided heart, and then giving a reason God is worth asking. For great is your love toward me; you have delivered me from the depths, from the realm of the dead.
The realm of the dead there is Sheol, the Hebrew word for the place of the dead. David says God delivered him from it. Whatever he had been through, he can point at it, and he gives it as his reason for calling the love great.
He says it while people are after him. The psalm has men in it who want him dead, and they haven’t gone anywhere by the last line of it. The rescue he names is finished and the trouble is running, and he says great is your love toward me with both of those on the table.
David says great is your love toward me. He gives the love a direction and stands at the end of it, and then he says what it did when it got there. God did something for him that he could describe to you if you asked, and a man can pray out of that on a day when his opinion of God is low.
The print of his grandfather is in a box at the back of the kid’s closet. He got very good at paper grades.
A Prayer to Remember
You got me out of one thing I had no way out of, God, and I’ve never properly said thanks for it. I can name it and I don’t bring it up much. Aim that same love at the part of my life that’s going under now.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
