Come, let us sing to the Lord and shout with joy to the Rock who saves us.
Let us approach him with praise and thanksgiving and sing joyful songs to the Lord.
Is this a good description of how we relate to God? Singing? Joyful? Praising? Thanking?
Alas, more often than not it’s something like,
“Let us cringe before the Lord and beg forgiveness from the One who judges us. Let us hide from him in fear and trembling, with sorrow for our failures, overwhelmed by our guilt.”
I will bless your name for ever. I will bless you day after day and praise your name for ever.
The Lord is great highly to be praised, his greatness cannot be measured….
The Lord is kind and full of compassion, slow to anger, abounding in love.
How good is the Lord to all, compassionate to all his creatures.
Why are we so masochistic? Why do we tend to be so self-destructive? Why do we seem to find pleasure in self-denial, self-accusation, shame, and the like?
Why, when we have a choice of what path to take, do we choose the way to the garbage dump over the flower garden?
We need to learn to stop looking at and evaluating ourselves first and foremost. We have to learn to stop imitating the evil queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, who asks, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”
Why don’t we learn to look first at God and see wonder, beauty, and goodness instead giving a priority to a morbid fascination with our own limitations, failings, and weaknesses?
Why is that we scurry to find new concealment when the stone that covers and weighs down our lives is removed?
Great are the works of the Lord: to be pondered by all who love them.
Majestic and glorious his work, his justice stands firm for ever.
He makes us remember his wonders. The Lord is compassion and love.
Excessive preoccupation with our own ignorance, weaknesses, and failures is a dead end street. Our Maker knows each of us better than we can know ourselves. We are imperfect, but, even so, we are loved.
The child who is scared, hurt, crying, or overwhelmed, sometimes reaches up with arms outstretched to be picked up and held tight in an embrace of security and love.
“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Let’s not think of the “Last Judgement” as a court room scene. God is not to be imagined as the All Powerful seated on a throne above. There is no prosecutor pointing the finger to each and every one of our failings nor any human jury to tender a unanimous verdict of guilty.
We need to learn to imitate the helplessness of the little child who knows no other recourse then to reach up. We need to reach out with complete trust to the One who is the very source of love itself.
Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.
11 July 2021