Deep Calls to Deep

This is one of the hardest weeks I have had in professional ministry.  I've had two lifelong congregants who I loved dearly pass away within four days of each other.  My grandmother-in-law is dying.  I have ethics and boundary training--an utterly soul-deadening experience that we pastors must undergo in order to keep our ordained standing, similar to a doctor or lawyer keeping up their license to practice law or medicine--all day on Saturday.

It is a truism in pastoral ministry that these sorts of weeks where everything that can beat you down will, those sorts of weeks come in waves.  Right now, the water is exactly at chin level.

But it is that mental image that sent me running for my Bible to dig up what has become one of my favorite Psalms--Psalm 42.  I will be reading it at one of my members' interment soon.  But I needed it today as well.

Perhaps you do as well, I do not know.  But on the chance that you do, the text is below.  As you read it, I could really, really use your prayers over the next week or two.

My thanks to my childhood friend--and current pastoral colleague--Rev. McKinna Daugherty, whose treatment of this text on September 11, 2011, introduced me to its great and profound truths.

Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Longview, Washington
May 5, 2016

Psalm 42

To the leader. A Maskil of the Korahites.

1 As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

3 My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”

4 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help 6 and my God.

My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

7 Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.

8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.

9 I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”

10 As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?”

11 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.