Sunday Morning Meds--Mercy

“Have mercy on me, O God,

have mercy on me,

for in you my soul takes refuge.” Psalm 57:1

Psalm 57 is not about sin. Forgiveness is not at stake here. David may well have reason to cower in the face of the almighty, but that’s not what’s going on. He’s tired and oppressed; he’s sick of this horrific, deadly, cops-‘n-robbers thing he’s got going with King Saul, the Lord’s anointed, and he can’t see his way of out of it. He’s tried to be charitable; when he could have killed the king, he cut out a shard of robe but let him live.

But nothing changed. He’s on the run, as he has been for too long, dozens of his people with him. They’re all refugees, scared to death. He’s got nowhere to turn in a cold wet cave, so he goes to his God. “Have mercy on me,” he says, “for in you my soul takes refuge.”

A man stood up in our church last week to ask for our prayers. It was sad and very painful to listen to him stammer, one of those moments when you wonder whether we should so easily spill out our guts in such a public forum. It was painful to hear him speak, in part because it wasn’t all that easy to understand what he was saying.

He and his wife have a baby on the way, and a doctor had told them that week that the baby wasn’t healthy. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, and I’m not sure how bad the condition; but it was clear from the recitation that the world that family had been living in was shaken deeply by the startling news of the baby’s precarious health.

Later, I was told that the mother—the father had done all the talking—was telling people she simply wasn’t sure anymore that God existed. It probably never dawned on them that there were other families with kids with significant problems sitting right there listening, not to mention the kids themselves.

I don’t worry about that woman or that family. Probably I should. When I was younger I would have. I know mothers in our church (fathers too, of course), people with kids with real problems, who would be glad to take her hand, hug her, and let her know that sometimes great blessings are not all that beautifully wrapped.

Which is not to say that anyone would tell her that her life, from this point on, is going to be a piece of cake. Some people are specially blessed to be able to say to her, right now, that what lies in wait for them around blind corners isn’t what they might fear or despise or even recognize. They know. They too have suffered.

Maybe—I don’t know—this young family with their two beautiful children has never before sat outside a cave like David did, the morning sun or an evening sky laid out before him promising a silence that he just can’t know, besieged as he is by seemingly insurmountable problems. Maybe it’s first time this young couple has felt really beat up.

Maybe I don’t worry all that much about them because of David sitting here with a shard of robe in his hand, convinced he did the right thing in not murdering the King, when he could have—yet knowing, as he does, that his life is imperiled because of the envy and pride of a man whose life he just saved. There seems no way out. “Mercy,” he cries.

At one point or another in our lives, all of us will cry mercy at the open and dark mouth of a cave, I believe. We have to.