Rector’s Reflections
Wednesday 13th March 2024
Psalm 62 : A Psalm of Comfort for Times of Stress
All of us experience times of stress and anxiety in our lives. How should we react at such times? What might be helpful by way of a coping strategy?
The author of Psalm 62 starts with three fundamental points. To start with, we need to learn patience. There will be a resolution of our difficulties. There is hope for the future. But we need to wait. Most problems and difficulties are not sorted out overnight. Of course, it is only natural for us to what everything out as soon as soon as possible, but the reality is that we will need to learn some patience. So the psalmist begins his psalm with the following words: “For God alone my soul waits in silence”. We can trust God to bring deliverance in God’s good time. Our role is to what we can to improve a situation- and having done all that we can do, to hand it over to God and wait.
This leads on to the second point. For whom are we waiting? We should be waiting for God. Sometimes we place all our hope on a human being or a human organisation to sort things out – we expect some individual or a group of people to come to our rescue. But human beings and human organisations are fallible. God can indeed work through a human being or an organisation, but human beings and their organisations are imperfect. We need to focus on God and put our trust in Him. Human beings and human organisations will never be able to fully live up to our expectations.
Thirdly, we need to remind ourselves of the certainty of our deliverance. God rescues us – it is His nature to do so. That’s what God does. In the words of the psalmist: “From Him comes my salvation”. So we can be confident that the cavalry is already on its way. However, God’s help can come to us in many different and sometimes unexpected ways. We need to have our eyes open, so that we can see what God is doing in our lives. It might be that God is helping us by giving us powers of resilience and a sense hope for the future. It might be that God is helping us by providing us with friends and family members who are there to support us through difficult times. God helps us in so many ways, but He does n’t force us to accept the help He offers. Often we are surrounded by people who would love to help us, but we are too proud or too embarrassed to ask for the help we need.
So the author of our psalm starts with these three essentials: we are to learn to be patient; to look to God for help; and to be confident that the help we need is actually already there – if we have the eyes to see it, and the humility to accept the help which is being offered.
But the psalmist does n’t finish there. These three points are merely the beginning. We will look at what else the psalmist has to say in the days ahead.