Psalm 78
Genesis 45:1-15
When Psalm 78 is the psalm of the day I usually groan. It is so long, even if you are only reading the part for morning or evening, and the story is so familiar. Those same old ups and downs of the Israelites. Today it occurred to me that I am just the same. God and I have been knocking around together for a long time. he has been doing the knocking and I do the running.
We first met when I was a teenager on a Christian Camp at Llanmadoc on the Gower Penisnsula in Wales. A beautiful setting. How could anyone not appreciate God and his creation? Towards the end of my high school career I decided that perhaps this was not the way to go. Apart from my faith how did I know there was a God. Also I was forgetting about Jesus party trick at the wedding, yes Jesus is a party animal otherwise he would have done nothing to the water as it was the end of the wedding and so everybody needed to sober up or given poor wine for the same reason. Agnostic, sitting on the fence, seemed to be the way to go. Even so when making the decision as to which college to attend I felt as if my brain was being guided. I did of course find a semi-logical explanation for my mother.
I could go on, just as Psalm 78 but I try to keep my thinking short so that it is easier to dwell on it and take out into the world for the day.
After I had decided that Psalm 78 would be my topic for the day I turned to one of my special books, A Guide to Prayer, which my friend Leslie Williams gave me about 20 years ago. She told me that she used a different color pen each year to make her comments and underlinings. I think it was about this time that I took courage in my hands and started making comments in books. On the eighth March 2002 I wrote "tell of your life with Christ" beside an extract from Henri Nouwen's "Time Enough to Minister". So apt after Psalm 78 though there was really no connection between them other than I read them both today. Our story and experience, the ups and downs, ins and out, and especially the to's and fro's of our relationship with God, his ever presence even in our shady times are our story and we each have one.
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