Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous. . .”

 All day long that summer day, an intermittent screech would come crashing through the open basement window of my office. A son of the man who used to live next door—before he died several years ago—was cleaning out his father’s three-stall garage, one old two by four at a time. The next day, out front, there stood a pyramid of junk, which attracted me for some shady reason, but I did my best to stay away.

 I couldn’t see him from where I sat, but I heard every last armful of trash come down on the pile whenever he’d emerge from the shadowy interior of the old garage. What made the job worse was that his father was an ace tinkerer. I’m not sure whether he was, by nature, a pack rat, but his father’s ability to fix anything meant that nothing lacked value.  It was a huge job, and my guess was that his son would be at it again on the morrow.

 I found the whole operation scary.  The detritus one accumulates throughout life is incredible. When we retired, we moved out of town and into the country where the massive prairie sky is a daily—and nightly—art museum. It was great, but moving wasn’t. And now, once again, we moved—this time back into town for --  hurts to say this – senior housing. Every move requires tossing things, determining what’s junk and what’s not..

Here in my office, I’m surrounded by stuff I wouldn’t think of tossing, stuff that will be just so much junk to my kids.  Maybe I ought to buy one of those little guns that produce lettered plastic tape and label everything—“this is a pin I got when I was asked to read an essay at a commemoration of 9/11—a year later.”  Who would ever know otherwise?  And who—well, no one—would ever care?

I’ve got two shelves of old Dutch books, some of which come from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, preachers in the old days. There are others, a dozen at least, that I bought for almost nothing at an auction. Some of those were printed before the American Revolution.  When I’m gone, will anyone care? —or will those ancient texts simply be returned to another auction, where some anxious fancier will gleefully buy them, and put them carefully on another bookshelf until she dies—an endless cycle.

That next door junk pile reminded me, all too clearly, of my own life, a thought that would never have entered my mind 25 years ago, but now, as I approach eighty, may well be all too haunting.

 By human standards, it’s impossible to deny that life is tragic; there’s no escaping the grim reaper, after all.  Everyone must die. Count on it. All things must pass. Today, I sat at a coffee table with a man who was told just this week that he has pancreatic cancer. All of us, seniors, will go; he sees it coming more clearly.

Someday, my books, my baseball trophies, my ergonomic keyboard—it all must go.  Even my wife, even my children—we all will die.

 Like so many Bible verses, it’s altogether too easy to pass over the triumph that sounds at the end of Psalm 32. “Rejoice,” King David the forgiven says. “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad.” It’s not a whimper or a whisper. It’s a shout because what needs to be routed is the despair we all come heir to as flesh weakens and spirits collapse before a rectangular hole in the ground.

 Rejoice, David says, as do all believers—“Rejoice and be glad.” Rejoice in His love because the Lord, the almighty tinkerer, makes all things new, even the junk next door—and the pile here in my heart. 

 Rejoice and be glad because God our Savior never tosses out a thing.