Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. –Psalm 42:11, NIV
But I’ve also been there: the guilt, the pain, the agony, the dreaded longing for a shedding tear (if you haven’t shed one already)… You realize you could’ve avoided it, but you did it anyway. You realize you couldn’t have avoided it, but you had no choice. There’s no halfway, and that righteously sucks! I call these “low” moments: we go through a (sometimes self-inflicted) Hell, yet we ask: “Why is God still forgiving me?”
But there are those dreaded moments…UGH, who doesn’t hate them? You don’t know where to go: right or left. You don’t know what to write. You read the Bible, but you can’t read it enough. You pray, but you think God’s either picking out what He wants to listen to and not every single word you can say to Him. You know you’re doing it- but are you doing it right?
God hates mediocre, we know that clearly! But do we really believe we are mediocre in His eyes? Look at the Sons of Korah: their father was killed because of his evil, deceiving ways, yet they were mightily spared of their disaster! They had nowhere to go: they enjoyed the highs of Israel, but were enduring the lows of their father’s untimely fate. And they were yet to face the limbo: their desert, the place of what seemed their ill-fated demise.
But there was something impressive: “Why, my soul, are you downcast?” In the middle of the hurricane, the tornado, whatever thing we can compare to that, they were singing and praising! (Would we do that even when things aren’t going our way?) Life was hating on them, it was beating them like a pulp, but they could still get their harps down and sing to the Lord: “I will yet praise Him!” I will yet praise Him! They already KNEW God would save them! It’s so amazing how they reacted to their adversity!
High, low, limbo, don’t care: there’s no time to waste to take out our harps and sing something to the Lord! (Now, to find them in a music store…) Souls downcast not, there’s still time to give all we got! With the help of God, we can beat it!