Muse - Part 2; Remembering the Rainbow

Psalm 77:4-9


"You kept my eyes from closing;
I was too troubled to speak.  
I thought about the former days, 
       the years ago;
I remembered my songs in the 
       night.  
My heart mused and my spirit
       inquired:


"Will the Lord reject forever?  
    Will he never show his favor
       again?
Has his unfailing love vanished 
       forever?
    Has His promise failed for all 
       time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
   Has he in anger withheld His
       compassion?"                         Selah

Many of us know how it is to....loose sleep.  Many as well know...the kind of sleep that is lost due to the eyes being kept open.  It's them nights, that we find the most difficult to endure.  Personally for me it goes from one extreme to the other.  I have had seasons where all I wanted to do is sleep.  And sleep.  And sleep some more.  Then, there have been nights, where I've not been able to sleep.  On both sides, it's hard.  I love though how much the Psalm's speak with such a real experience of which we can easily relate.  "I was too troubled to speak".  Being troubled to the point of loosing sleep and being speechless.  It's a wrestling...a place of screaming silence in the midst of sometimes the loudest and longest laments of lingering adversity.  We spend them nights just agonizingly - going over and over, meditatively musing the events of which are catastrophically out of our control.  Looking for something...to reveal a window ...where we just might regain control.  

In such a night - I remember myself literally as the Psalmist writes, "remembering my songs in the night..."  I not only like to write meditatively, but also, poetry and lyrics.  I have a chest of lyrics laced around the legacy's left behind by my father.  Many of which were written in "the night'.  Songs have been sung over and over, while traveling miles on the road making trips from here to there...all while in the midst of such nights.  Songs that have carried me through the desolate desert of betrayal, murder, rape, addictions, socio-pathic behaviors, and the like.  Longing to become a rose...in a dry and barren land, I was.  As I would muse...the questions were easily found flowing freely from my fragile fragmented heart...and they sounded much like the Psalmist writes here.  Listen again...he holds nothing back- of the human hearts hungry; haunting cry for answers:
    
     "Will the Lord reject forever?  
        Will he never show his favor
                         again?
       Has His promise failed for all
                         time? 
       Has God forgotten to be merciful?

            Has He in anger withheld his compassion?"    Selah     


What are the themes in this pouring out; this posture and position of his heart?  
Rejection.
Loss of Favor.
Promises - Lost.
Forgotten.
Merciless.
Anger instead of Compassion.


I asked in the first part of this Muse....What kind of relationship does one have, with one who can ask and pose such statements?  I would say...a very intimate one.  Otherwise, where and what kind of relationship really contains such things- lost?  I adore the writing God has given in the Psalms...because it gives us both affirmation and permission to be fully authentic, fully transparent before our God.  Is that not the kind of relationship we are all longing for?  If we aren't...then we aren't going to find relationship fully alive!  




I can remember so very much all the desolation, I have come through.  I remember so many tears.  So many feelings.  So many memories.  We remember much...when we have been through.  Through and through; we have been, many of us.  We're not alone.  Not in the going through.  Not ever.  But, if we don't ask the questions, if we don't muse and meditate, if we don't as it said in the first verses I talk about from Psalm 77 of my writing; "Muse part 1",  - "Yell out to God....Cry out", and pour out our soul....but instead, let it stay inside- we'll find ourselves purging it out in some fragmented way or another.  And we never fully find we indeed are - not alone.  He is always with us.  But...

we won't always feel that way, or feel that we aren't.  WE WILL  feel alone.  To say otherwise, is to deny the truth.  Even Jesus Himself, felt abandoned by His Father, while taking upon Him the worst of all suffering of mankind ever.  The sins of all, once and for all.  HE not only felt it, but yelled it out from the depths of the most hellish experience anyone has ever endured; "My God!!!! MY GOD!!!! WHY!!! have you FORSAKEN ME????  


I'm pondering right now, a thought-....  Until we feel we have lost something or are missing something, might we not go looking for it?  Or, ask it this way; until we find ourselves, without something, will we recognize our need, the vacancy of what it is we don't have?  What does it take for us to have a need to- Remember?  What causes one to have any thought to Remember?  Why Remember?  What causes us the need to Remember?  

The knowledge of something; having been.


And so where does one begin to remember from?  How far back does one go; in remembering?  Well, I guess that would depend on, what it is you are trying to recall?  Or perhaps, why you are trying to remember.  


Are you good, at Remembering?





The Psalmist goes on after this pouring out,...and begins again to write about what he will do; 


Verse 10 - 12:
 ..."To this I will appeal:
 the Years of the right hand of the Most High. "
  "I will remember the deeds of the Lord...
    Your miracles of long ago...
           mediate on all your works, consider all your mighty deeds.  
Your ways are....Holy, ...great, ...miraculous...powerful...mighty...redemptive, ...."


and he writes more going on about the amazing and miraculous ways God delivers His people out of slavery and bondage from Egypt.  I encourage you to go and read the whole Psalm.  

I see often in the Psalms, the writer will pour out his soul...and all that it contains.  He will unveil the real struggle, the perspectives of his situation from his angle of agony.  Oh...how thankful I am for this.  It's the quote I love from Shadowlands, "We read to know we're not alone"; that resonates as I read the Psalms.  And what I love more than anything...in all the recounting and revealing of the reality of his soul, peril and all....the writer does this....he Remembers.  And it's in this remembering...that we are once again, seeing what we began to see in the beginning, differently.  It's that beautiful rainbow that comes after the storm...full of color and radiance that can only be seen after, but longed for, leaned upon, and lived within...in the remembering.


Dear Savior, of whom has suffered and agonized;
for me,


Thank you...for opening through your Holy Spirit;
 windows of pain- 
    the writer's of the Psalms; have given us.  


I love Lord, that many nights... 
these Psalms have not just spoken the tears of David and other's,
                       but have dripped with my tears; 
                          trailing through the tragic, 
threads of time.  


Oh Savior...how I have found comfort in these times. 
How I have been able to remember...
       "I read to know I am not ...alone".  But, Savior, ...


there are those times too, where the remembering has not come so easily. 


 Yes, I have remembered.  


But, not those threads of the story...
where You, held it all together for me. 


 Where the time lines of all that took place, 
            were tenderly tasseled 
in the torrents of Your Grace.  


Oh, how if I had not taken time to remember...
            I'd not have seen; just a glimpse; of such sovereign scenes.  Help me Savior,...


to remember more often, 
You too, felt-


 alone.  


Forsaken.  


Abandoned. 


 And in that truth alone, 
I can take the comfort of those words,

         as companions traveling alongside me.  

Thank you for the songs, in the night. 
                           And help me see beyond, the storms; 


that I might see more quickly...
                the rainbow of the miraculous-
    moving amongst...


the remembering.