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Neither Proud...

             Lord, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes arrogant; nor do I involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me. I have certainly soothed and quieted my soul; like a weaned child resting against his mother, my soul within me is like a weaned child. Israel, wait for the Lord from this time on and forever. (Psalm 131)

 

My thoughts go in two directions about the first sentence. The first is “Ha! Liar!” Sometimes, there’s even a “Dude. Hold my coffee,” thought or two. The second is “This is all I want to do. Make the big and difficult matters disappear, and let me garden, craft, and write. Why can’t I just be a hermit?” That’s a topic I might do well to explore further, but I suspect it conflicts with the idea of “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The second sentence also gets split responses. The first is, “Soothed and quieted? Ha!” and the second is, “That’s what I want.”

Mr. Peterson wrote that the song includes not being too big for our britches but also not being a cranky baby constantly in need. Some people seem to be incapable of doing anything for themselves, and sometimes that’s a lack of experience. Still, other times, it’s just a variation of being too big for our britches. We may not command people to put us at the center of their lives and serve us, but we can whimper them into it, and that works just as well. And there are times when I think I say, “Dude. Hold my coffee” at this end of the spectrum, too.

It's not unusual for me to try to prove I’m “good enough” or even “better than you.” I also crawl into bed and start in with “Lord, I was a miserable failure today, yada, yada, yada,” every night. I also know from when I was jogging and walking more that it tended to take about 30 minutes to get past all the garbage in my mind and all the verbal beatdowns I wanted to deliver to people who weren’t there- if I worked at it.

The thing is that both extremes can be defeated if we shift our focus from ourselves to God. Some people do what’s called (by some) a centering or breath prayer. The idea is to clear the mind - and I’ve heard well-meaning folks warn against the “emptying of the mind” practiced (supposedly) in Eastern meditation. If you kick all thoughts out, who knows what can wander in? But I’m not suggesting we be brainless or thoughtless, but to practice choosing where our focus will be, and making that choice be somewhere other than all that garbage. It sounds like a plan to try.

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