The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me besides the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a fable before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Psalm 23
As overnight temperatures dropped well below freezing, a thin layer of ice formed on the tiny pond in our back yard. I walked out to turn on the waterfall and stood waiting for the water to spill out and run over the tempered and glassy sheet. The frozen roof of ice cracks and moans, shifting under the weight, then finally buckles under a layer of water spreading and reaching across the pond. The old hard shell of protection must fall away to new living water and disperse itself with the flow and movement forward. Change is here but not easy, and different can be good in its offering of freshness and vitality. I am reminded of my ability to change also, to be resilient in the midst of this shifting water, that I can be flexible and shed the harder layers of my protective shell.
As the sun courses over my pond the frozen pieces break away to form a beautiful, complex puzzle of miniature icebergs. They melt and crack, recycling into the pond, adjusting, moving and seek new paths between the cobblers and stones.
In our prayer group, we have been studying Psalm 23, a song, a poem, of enduring hope and assurance by David, then a shepherd. It is not a long passage but fulfills the promise of God’s message to each one of us, that he is here with us for the long haul, from the moment we take our first breath until the moment we take our last and leave our bodies behind. The author David was in his early teens and must have written the verses to this psalm when he felt a sense of overwhelming peace and thanksgiving in the arid surroundings where he dwelled. He was a shepherd, his house was the desert, and in tending to his sheep, calling each one by name, he reveled in the totality of his natural surroundings, then poetically put his thoughts to verse. While resting in the green pastures and meandering brooks, out of the reach of the harshness of the desert sun, his flock grazed and rested too – some eating and renewing their energy, some perhaps reposed in the shade of a pond’s tall willows.
When night came, when the safety of his flock might be in jeopardy, stars from the heavens winked at David as he listened for signs of danger. There was always the risk of his sheep wandering off into the night or wild animals attacking the herd. He had to be alert to prideful lions who were known to prowl like thieves and slip in for a kill. All night he stood vigil for signs of their stealthy approaches, anticipating the morning where he would see God’s face in the rising sun that cast a brilliant light upon the valley of the shadow of death. Then, feeling its warmth against his robe, he could lay down his rod and staff for a moment and rest in the confidence that he was taken care of, that he need not fear evil, that all of his sheep were safe and that he would be protected when nightfall inevitably came again.
The 23rd Psalm is often recited at funerals to give hope and peace to those who are grieving. As we listen to the verse quoted throughout our lives, we are reminded that God restores us deep down, on a soulful level. Water will always flow down to the deepest point it can find, like God does, and then, when it pools and becomes still, it begins to seek another level further on. It washes out the grime and dirt as it moves. Like David who listened for his Father’s voice in the darkness of the desert, we are assured that God’s provision and peace will find its rightful resting place in our souls, restore and fill the icy holes of our heart, then spill over with the grace of new and flowing, clear and clean water. It is the same water that we all drink and can offer in turn to those that are hurting or injured or sick or lonely or tired, or lost. Our psalm for them is the same one that it is for ourselves because we have all been all of those things at one time or another.
When we dwell on God’s peace, reciting Psalm 23 that David wrote, we risk believing that God is there and listening to us. We walk out onto what we may think is some thin spiritual ice, wondering if God is listening, thinking that he is fragile and breakable, and that we must be out of our minds for believing he can hold us up. What am I doing here on my knees praying, we may ask? Why am I looking for strength and guidance and safety on such thin ice and brittle terrain? But as we pray the words of Psalm 23, our veneer melts away and is replaced by a peace that passes all understanding, and we begin to feel, just as David did, that goodness and mercy will surely follow us, just as it followed him out in the desert when he was herding his sheep, protecting them against enemies and leading them to the next watering hole.
During the weeks following my brother’s death, my mother was visited by a hawk every day. While it may have been hunting for the smaller birds near her birdfeeder, my mother had never seen a hawk anywhere near her property before that time. Being that my brother Gary loved nothing more than to be outside in the thick of nature, my mother was reassured by the statuesque form of the hawk who sometimes perched for an hour as if a sentinel guard, reassuring her of God’s presence and protecting her in her sorrow and grief. While God was nowhere to be found in the flesh, the hawk floated above with the provision of an Almighty presence over the landscape of her soul.
In our family, we have come to be reminded that God is with us, there, leading us besides still water when we are in the sudden presence of a hawk. While this may sound secular and “new age” to many Christians who may see the appearance of a hawk as nothing more than a chance meeting or questionable theology, my mother knew her Maker intimately, and knew the difference between a hawk and God, and recognized how God’s beauty is both revealed in nature and inspired by it in equal measure. We are to be reminded that it is God who made all creatures and has sovereign control over their whereabouts, and just as he helped David herd his sheep, he shepherds us and restores our souls, all in the same breath.
The scenery that David saw every day as a shepherd surely inspired many of the Psalms he wrote, including the 23rd, which contains descriptive imagery of a lush and verdant landscape, reminders of the nature God created for our benefit to enjoy. It was also part of a daily landscape that solidified David’s confidence in a perfect Father who would always be circling nearby – watching and comforting. It is interesting that David uses Psalm 22 and Psalm 24 as bookends to Psalm 23, describing Christ’s crucifixion on the one side and then telling us how he is coming for us on the other. In the middle, Psalm 23, which is where we live now, he is caring for us and offering us the still waters of his peace and restoration. Finally, in our pain and suffering, David indicates in Psalm 24 that Christ is coming for us where we will rest forever in His pasture of lovingkindness. Crucifixion, caring, and then, His coming.
Surely, our cup runneth over.