Sunday Morning Meds -- The Beauty of the Lord

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;. . .” Psalm 90:17

One of my grandmother’s older sisters, I’m told, had had a very difficult life in the early years of the 20th century. She’d had but two children and one of whom died as a child—I don’t know why, and neither does anyone else, now, a century later. Grandma’s sister’s name was Cora, and her husband was a salesman. One day, Cora’s husband simply never returned from work, left his wife and only child.

Her surviving daughter went off to college—unusual for the early years of the century, but then Cora’s father was a professor. At college she fell in love with a bright young man with a distinguished academic future. The two of them planned marriage once he could get a job and they could get themselves financially stable. Then, Cora’s daughter, soon to be a bride, came down with a strange disease and died soon after, leaving Cora all alone.

I heard that story from an aunt, who remembered being told as a child.

There’s more. Some time later, Cora died. And when her relatives looked through her belongings—there were no heirs and no spouse—they found a letter in her desk addressed to the husband who had abandoned her, a letter Cora had written, knowing that someday she would die and hoping that something of hers would find its way to him, wherever he might be.

That letter, my aunt told me, explained that she loved him so much that, after he left, every night she’d stay awake until, finally, she’d hear the wheels of the last Wealthy Street trolley move slowly away into the night.

That sound of those wheels stays with me, carrying the portrait of an abandoned wife who has buried her only two children, a woman who waits, every night, hoping to hear footsteps coming up the sidewalk to the front door of her empty home.

My aunt told that story for another reason—she wanted to describe my grandmother, a woman I never knew.

Because there is still more. On the walls of my grandmother’s bedroom, she kept a collection of pictures of her family, including a snapshot of her sister, Cora, and two small children. When Grandma was dying, and suffering—according to the aunt who told me this—she looked across the room and saw that picture, then asked if someone would please turn it away from her because the very sight of her sister Cora brought back the pain of a story that, even on her own death bed, broke her heart.

Most translations offer Psalm 90:17 this way—“may the beauty of the Lord shine upon us.” I don’t doubt for a moment that’s what my grandmother wanted, especially on her deathbed—only the beauty of the Lord. Clearly, it’s what Moses wanted, not only for himself, but for his people. Psalm 90 rises in his parched soul from far too many Aunt Cora stories out there in the desert. It’s what Grandma wanted, and what Moses wanted—the beauty of the Lord shining upon us.

Don’t we all?

Some of that beauty is here, even in the almost forbidding darkness of this great Psalm, Psalm 90, from the soul of Moses. Read it for yourself and feel some of the radiance of God’s divine beauty. It’s here. Go ahead, read the whole thing.