As You Go – Pray

“The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.” Psalm 138:8

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” are the haunting words beginning Psalm 137. This powerful yet very unnerving Psalm of anger, frustration and lament moves the prayer to a heightened level of emotions. The Psalmist asks the penetrating question, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song?”  There are nine verses as the writer laments the loss of home and all the familiarity that makes up life. The Psalmist sits by the waters and weeps over all that is lost realizing everything that is remotely familiar is gone.

At some point in life each of us have found ourselves sitting beside the waters lamenting how we can sing a song to the Lord. Though we are not quite in the same place as the Psalmist, in some ways we have all experienced much of the same loss and disruption of life. The coronavirus pandemic can feel as if an enemy nation has laid bare the land and left us struggling to find our footing. Yet as the Psalmist did in 137, we find the words of hope and our future in our faith. Our faith allows us to move from the riverbanks of despair to the sanctuary of praise.

Adapting to change of any kind is often a challenging and even frightful exercise of life. Change comes as we leave home as young adults.  Change comes as we find our first job or move to a new one. Change comes as we marry and create our own family. Change comes when we move from what we have known to the unknown. The ultimate change comes at the gateway of Heaven.

Oliver Sacks in his book, “Everything in its Place” shares the story of his Aunt Len coping with her life of change. Sacks writes, “My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.”

Normally we find adapting to change not really an overwhelming problem. We adapt to new technology even though it can, at times, be frustrating. Never the less, we progress from flip phones to our iPhones. We learn to adapt to a new home and find it is OK once we’re familiar with all the light switches. No, what we find as the greatest challenge is the loss of what we had before the change.

In the same way that Oliver Sack’s aunt learned to drive a car, the loss was found in never seeing the horses and carriages on the streets again. We may enjoy the new, recently built restaurant but we reminisce the loss of the old café that previously stood on the corner. We enjoy the words of the new worship songs but we still find ourselves missing some of the old hymns.  We enjoy the new methods of communication but somehow there is a loss when we walk by the place where the old phone hung on the kitchen wall.

Yes, we walk through the emotions of anger and loss as the Psalmist did in 137. We vent our loss to God and yet through our lament we come to the place where we can pray, “I give you thanks, O LORD, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing your praise; I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. On the day I called, you answered me; my strength of soul you increased.” Psalm 138:1-3

We learn to adapt to the changes. What is hard to adapt to is the loss of what can never be again. Yet it is in the loss that we are able to begin writing a new storyline.  Gratefully, we come to the place where we can answer the question, “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” It is with friends, family and most importantly, God that our new storyline comes alive.

God is great,

Pastor Lynn Burton