Perhaps not surprisingly, we left out a few verses. If you've ever read the whole psalm, you'll know the verses I mean. (If you haven't ... or you can only remember the "tidied up" version ... you can read it here. I'm still guessing you'll be able to figure out which verses ... but just in case, watch out when you get to verses 19-22. You probably haven't heard them very often.)
Those verses are full of pictures too, but not very pleasant ones. The disturbing thing to me is not that the psalm includes them ... let me rephrase that, that's not what disturbed me this morning. The verses themselves are certainly different from the rest of that psalm. Truthfully, I think they're meant to disturb us but that's a whole different query. The disturbing thing is not even that we left certain verses out; it made sense given the context in which they were used. We're not even going to start on reading Scripture passages or anything else out of context, that too is an entirely different issue.
The problematic thing to me is the way the hymn book printed the words of the psalm; it makes it look like those verses never even existed. There's no indication that what's been produced is not the whole psalm. There's no indication that they've picked and chosen what to include and what to exclude. They've just done it and made it look like the tough part doesn't exist.
Is that really how we want to approach things? Do we pretend that the difficult things are just not there? Do we ignore their existence so that we won't have to wrestle with why God allowed them to be included and discover what they might teach us?
...
Apparently I have an email I need to go write. That's the problem with letting your mind ask questions about the tough stuff. Sometimes you have to do something about it.
"When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressues."
Peter Marshall
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