Friday, March 17, 2017
Come, let us sing to the Lord!
Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come to him with thanksgiving. Let us sing psalms of praise to him. For the Lord is a great God, a
great King above all gods. He
holds in his hands the depths of the earth and the mightiest mountains. The sea belongs to him, for he made it. His hands formed the dry land, too. Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our
maker, for he is our God. We
are the people he watches over, the flock under his care. If only you would listen to his voice today! Psalm 95:1-7(NLT)
I got caught in a bit of nostalgia the other day driving through a
fast-food place for a cup of coffee on the run.
Waiting in the long line of cars (so much for fast-food), an older couple exited the building with a
young girl in pigtails. She was about 11
and she was holding Grandma’s hand and
skipping! On closer
examination her mouth was wide with a smile, her face exuberant, and she held
no electronic devices in her hands. I
thought: How did Grandma and Grandpa get that IPhone away from her…did they just
promise to buy her a Mercedes when she turns 15?
Then I took stock of Russell’s mood.
My wife was home sick, I was on my way to run sixty-two errands on a
Saturday; none of the errands involved a golf club, but most required me to enter
stores certain to be crowded (my favorite!), and the guy behind me just honked to
get me to move because the car in front of me had moved three inches. No matter what, I could not have written
Psalm 95 in that moment.
C.S. Lewis seemed to work out a lot of his theology in his writing; I
guess those of us who choose (or are compelled) to the written page do so. In his writings somewhere, as he explained
the rationale behind heaven’s actual existence, and why it was so logical that
such a place existed, he mused that the mere fact we get thirsty presupposes that
somewhere there is water; same for food and a place to lay down our head in
sleep. The deep longing in our souls for
our Creator, that God-shaped empty place in our hearts of which Augustine wrote,
is evidence-enough that heaven exists.
We long for where we belong.
The little girl I saw skipping alongside grandparents struck that kind of
chord in my soul, a longing for a different day, absent of the struggle between
people, where the joy of thanksgiving, singing to the Lord, shouting joyful
praise to our Rock of Salvation stems the tide of in-your-face anger and
contention of this new millennial jungle.
It’s
a longing for a different day…the kind of day for which we were created.
Just
sayin’!
For You Today
Do
you ever long for a kinder, gentler way?
NOTES
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