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Help

I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. (Psalm 121:1-2)

I may have shared what I’m about to share about this passage before, but it’s one of those things that goes around and comes around. I’m feeling a little under the weather – not enough to make me want to go find out what’s wrong, but enough to make me wish someone would come along and mother me. That doesn’t take much.

It seems as if I frequently wish that a knight in shining armor would come along to rescue me…

Or maybe it’s a master gardener coming along to fix my gardens…

Or a handyman to fix things that aren’t entirely broken, but aren’t exactly whole…

Or a mentor to guide my writing, or my diet, or my crafting, or….

Or a good friend who will actually listen to my tales of woe – those stories of minor mishaps that seem significant to me at the time – and not think me a weakling, and idiot, or a whiny little brat. [As an aside, I have thought in the past that the struggles one goes through are what makes one strong and/or beautiful. At the moment, I’m thinking in a different direction. Could it be in our pain that we find out meaning? We seem to judge people based on their suffering: this one is really suffering and deserves honor, but that one doesn’t face as big a challenge, so they don’t. Could that be something deeper, or truer, or righter than narcissism? Do we, in fact, find our truest, deepest, most real self in suffering? I don’t know. Back to the main idea.]

Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this way, who wishes someone would come along, make things the way we want them to be, and (quite probably) to ride off into the sunset until the next time we want them. But what today’s passage tells us is that those places we look to for help aren’t where our help is found. I look to the hills – and nothing happens.

Where does my help come from? It comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. That help may involve another person, or a change in attitude, or a miracle. There seem to be so many directions from which our help may come. If we put all our hope in any of them except God, we’re likely to be disappointed. It’s when we look for God in our needs that we are open to solutions that may not be what we were looking for, but that work better.

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