Psalm 1-2, 15, 22-24, 47, 68

Today’s reading had me heart-first into the Psalms.  I paid particular attention to some verses in Psalm 22.  David hit rock bottom and just cried his heart out to the Lord.  He provides me with a good model for how to cry out to God for myself.  I self-regulate my prayers oftentimes out of respect for the Lord’s sovereignity.  But then are they real?

Two separate doctors have recommended a day surgery for me for a problem I’ve been suffering.  Like an idiot, I looked it up online and discovered some disconcerting details.   One study showed that 45% of the women who had the surgery had to go back within one year to start all over again.  That’s rather higher than I would have expected.  And the potential harm to the person having the surgery, while rare, (2-4 out of 1ooo), can be serious requiring additional surgeries and overnight stays at the hospital.

Enter instant chest pain.  It happens when I become overly anxious…as I did when I read about the procedure.

After finding out that information, I feel rather like David must have felt as he penned these words in Psalm 22:

¹⁴ I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted away within me.

¹⁵ My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;

Have you ever been so afraid that you became “jelly-legged?”  I have…frequently.  It goes hand in hand with anxiety attacks.  Has your heart ever melted away within you?  The description above sounds a lot like a panic attack.  Could it be that David had them, too?

Yet I pattern my prayers after David’s, who, although in terrible pain, managed to find the bright side of his travails:

²² I will declare your name to my brothers;
in the congregation I will praise you.

²⁷ All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations
will bow down before him,

²⁸ for dominion belongs to the LORD
and he rules over the nations.

Dominion does belong to the Lord…He has my back.  He knows about this pain I suffer through…and He will provide a way to either remove it or get me through it.

Amen!!