Psalm 71:12-16
O God, do not be far from me;
O my God, make haste to help me!
Let my accusers be put to shame and consumed;
let those who seek to hurt me
be covered with scorn and disgrace.
But I will hope continually,
and will praise you yet more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,
of your deeds of salvation all day long,
though their number is past my knowledge.
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God,
I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.
The Story We Tell
This morning was one of those mornings. For that matter, yesterday morning was too. Yesterday, it was the dogs up early and waking the neighborhood with their barking…me in the clothes I’d worn to bed, barefoot in the yard, yelling at them ineffectually to be quiet and get inside. Today, it was a mad scramble to leave the house on time and me—once again—unable to find my car keys and expressing my frustration quite colorfully with two of my boys right there to hear every word. Lucy wouldn’t come into the house, even after being enticed with ham, and I knew, without him saying a word, that Logan was stressed by the very real possibility at that point of being late for school. Sigh.
As I sit here and write I realize how insignificant these rushed, bedraggled mornings are in the grand scheme of things. But in the moment, they’re all consuming, however briefly.
It’s easy for me to tell a story of failure, of frustration, of ridiculously losing something EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. I’ve never considered myself to be a glass-half-empty kind of person, but maybe I am. It’s incredibly easy for me to focus on all that is wrong, in my personal life and in the public sphere in which we all live.
But what about what’s right?
Righteous is a strange word. It seems primarily relegated to the Bible, with the exception perhaps of self-righteous (which seems an easy quality to notice in others and far more difficult to perceive in myself. That’s for another day.)
Today, I want to think about righteous as, simply, what is right.
As I so easily focus on all that is wrong on any given day, what is right?
The psalmist offers a helpful way forward. Addressing God, the psalmist sings: “My mouth will tell of your righteous acts, of your deeds of salvation all day long, though their number is past my knowledge. I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God, I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.
What is right is what God is up to on any given day.
With the psalmist, we tell of God’s righteous acts. We praise God’s righteousness. When I’m caught up in all that is wrong, what would it mean to intentionally stop (however briefly) and ask God to help me notice, to perceive, to attend to what is right?
I’m imagining a breath prayer that I might use in the hectic days to come: On the inhale, “Help me, God.” On the exhale, “What is right?”
Or, perhaps I need only to look at this picture every day to remember what is right (September 2017, Martha’s Vineyard for a dear friend’s wedding).
This is not to diminish the need for lament, the need to perceive and to name the injustices in our world, the self-righteousness and unrighteousness that pervade and persist. It is to say that the psalmist intends, yearns even, to “hope continually.”
What if hope grows as we attend to what God is doing in the world? If we seek it out? If we pause to perceive it? What if hope and praise are intimately connected? What if the story we tell either limits—or expands—not only the hope that dwells within us but also the hope that flows out from us to a world in need of the life that hope creates?
I invite you to rest in today’s song and consider the story you’ll tell this day. What story is God telling through you?