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Refreshes

  He refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. (NIV)

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. (KJV)

(Psalm 23:3)

          The supplemental reading material to the study my Sunday School class is doing is Life Without Lack, which is based on the teachings of Dallas Willard. I have to imagine that this might have been Prof/. Willard’s favorite verse in the song, because it talks about souls. Elsewhere, he described souls as the CEO of a person, integrating the activities of the mind (thoughts and feelings), the heart (will,) the body, and its interaction with the larger world.

          Depending on which translation you prefer, you get slightly different, but complementary ideas. In the NIV, it’s said that He refreshes our souls. What refreshes you? How do you feel when you are refreshed? The second is the better question. Years ago, when I was exercising lots more than I am, I realized that for the first half of my jog, I was wound up, going around in circles mentally and emotionally, lecturing people who weren’t there. On the way back, however, I could feel my shoulders relaxing, and my mind let go of the garbage. I felt refreshed, possibly because I didn’t have enough energy to jog and continue on my mental gerbil wheel.

          I also find that I feel refreshed when I take a shower, or when the temperature falls far enough that I don’t sweat just sitting at my desk and a breeze kicks up. I sometimes feel refreshed when windchimes chime, or water makes any of a number of repetitive noises (whether gurgling streams, babbling brooks, or waves pounding on the rocky coast of Maine.) Refreshment also comes when one drinks something that eases stress (cool drink on a hot day, hot drink on a cold day, drink of a preferred flavor whenever…) In other words, I tend to feel refreshed when something pleasant replaces something unpleasant or stress is somehow removed.

          The other word, “restore” is even more interesting. When one restores, one gives back or returns to the original condition. To restore a soul, then, would have to do with fixing the imbalance of the soul, removing the flesh, body, emotions, thoughts, and will from control, and putting them back into submission to the soul, so that none of them rule over the others. Wouldn’t it be “loverly” to live a life in which you weren’t at war with yourself? To not find unimportant things crowding out important things? So often, our lives seem to be like a car out of alignment, always pulling to one direction or another even though we know there’s a guard rail, a sidewalk, or a cliff in that direction. We struggle against the steering wheel, trying to force the vehicle to stay straight, but since the wheels are pointed in the same direction as the chassis, chances are we aren’t going the same direction that the headlights are pointed.

          The best thing to do when a car is out of alignment is to get it aligned – to restore it to proper alignment. That, rather than everything being the way we want it, is what this passage describes. He guides us into alignment with righteousness, not for our pleasure, but for the sake of His name – which means because He is Himself, and to do otherwise would require that He be someone else.

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