The Penumbra Passages: Got Room for a Pep Talk?

Psalm 4

Think back to an experience in your life when you found yourself in a “tight spot.” Or maybe take a moment to reflect on how you find yourself to be in one right now. We can locate ourselves in such a circumstance for any number of reasons – sudden or ongoing financial difficulty, having to make a tough personal or work-related decision, enduring the heartache of a strained relationship with a loved one or friend, not managing to take care of yourself well, feeling time-crunched with too many to-do’s, and the like.

We can also come to feel ourselves in tight spots with God. How does this happen? I find it’s when you find yourself pinched by doubts and desperations because deep down you are uncertain about just how trustworthy and reliable the Almighty is. I find it’s when you just aren’t fully convinced God is listening and loving and leading … when the Good News of Jesus Christ feels like ancient news instead of the current headline your heart needs. Consequently, you rehearse faithful beliefs and lift up good sounding prayers while simultaneously sinking further into sin-enticed self-reliance, skepticism and, at worst, self-destruction.

One pastor has written about how literally being in a tight spot helped him to see the tight spot he’d been experiencing with God. It happened about five years into his being the pastor of a brand new church development. These five years of upstart ministry had been full of very long work weeks, of not taking days off or vacations, and of sadly coming to rely on sleeping pills. All the while, he’d been teaching and preaching the Bible, including all those guiding passages that exhort trusting and resting in the gracious power of the Lord.

The stress simply burst in the middle of one particular night. He awoke in a start with a strange sense that God had been laughing at him. Shaken, he wondered what this unsettling experience was all about.

He wasn’t able to gain helpful insight about this until some space of time later when he was helping move his family into a new home. That’s when he found himself in a physical tight spot while trying to move a very heavy desk. By himself. To little success.

So his four year old son came along and offered to help his daddy. After a few minutes of attempting to push and pull together, and not getting very far, the boy came to a conclusion. He blurted out, “Dad, you’re in my way!” The pastor papa couldn’t help but laugh at this, at the cute way his son believed he could handle the burdensome work better all by himself … without the assistance of his stronger, wiser father.

In the middle of this amusement, he was suddenly loosed from his spiritual tight spot. He became convicted and inspired about why he’d sensed God had been laughing in the middle of the night. He’d been a child of God too narrowly focused on his own capacity to move along all the weighty matters, all the pushing and pulling pressures of that new church development. He hadn’t been truly trusting in the Lord as his helper and his true strength.

Of course I can’t say whether or not God was actually laughing. I suspect it was just this person’s Holy Spirit empowered way of working out how foolish he’d been for not giving God more of his burdens, not more fully practicing what he preached. However it happened, it is an illustration of how our experiencing a spiritual tight spot can inspire us to become deeply engaged in inner dialogue with ourselves and with God concerning how well we are following our faithful convictions. Eventually, the fruit of this self and sacred reflection may spill out in things we choose to speak and write about. That’s how I came upon reading this desk-pushing pastor’s story.[i] And this is also how most all my song lyrics and sermons come about. Tight spots with God can graciously turn into truly expansive spiritual growth.

What we have in Psalm 4 is a long ago conversation of this very sort. And it’s a model one for all us at that. As one scholar has noted, “the Psalmist’s self-doubt emerges in the face of conflicting beliefs” but then turns this into a “pep talk” in which “the Psalmist hears out loud his own convictions” and “models for us a way out of distress by articulating who God is and how God is for us.”

We read in this Scripture the tight-spot of doubt about whether or not God will answer when called upon. We read the tight-spots shame, dishonor, and vanity can cause. We read the tight-spot of despair concerning whether the good light of God will shine again. For each of these familiar-to-us tight-spots, the Psalmist reports the good news that God does not abandon us because of our questioning and doubting and distrusting. Instead, God graciously gives us room.

Let’s really appreciate the breadth of what this means. The original Hebrew language word for “room” literally translates to mean “space.” But not just space as in to politely move one seat over on a bus. It means space as in “to release from a tight noose at the neck.”[ii] It’s life-saving space that God gives us. To further accentuate this dramatic point, the word we translate in English as “distress” literally means “narrow” as in “a constricted larynx.”[iii] One fresh contemporary way of translating Psalm 4, verse 1 is to say to God, “You gave me breathing space when I was suffocating.”

What an amazing word to us this is. Who doesn’t want and need room to breathe, to be, to process, to not feel judged and pressured when our faithfulness feels constricted? We want and need this from one another, and at our core, we sure do deeply want it from God. Psalm 4 acknowledges and celebrates that our Lord is willing not to micromanage, to let us work out all our insecurities.[iv]

One very good and glorious reason God allows this is so that we will become open to greater gladness. This Psalm preaches that this is gladness greater than any material good could ever inspire us to have. Back in the Psalmist’s day, this meant even the gladness brought about by a great harvest and an abundance of wine. Doing an inventory of spiritual gladness, of that which you are soulfully grateful for, of all the times when God not only tolerated but gave you great room to work through a spiritual tight spot … this really helps build up tremendous faithful trust.

When I went through a two year training program in the art of spiritual direction a couple years ago, I was taught to practice something called The Prayer of Examen. This is a time-honored way of praying that is credited to Ignatius of Loyola around the turn of the 16^th century. When practiced daily, it can increase our trust that God is with us, giving us room to grow, and opening us to greater gladness.

I’m happy to meet, discuss and help practice this in more detail anytime asked to do so, but for these concluding moments in the pulpit, let me quickly explain the process of this formative prayer.[v]

The overall goal of this practice is to become more aware of God’s presence and the Holy Spirit’s movement throughout the day. This is done by intentionally making time to review the past 24 hours of your life in a special, simple way. You begin by calmly reminding yourself that God desires to be present to you in all and through all. Next and as objectively as possible, consider all the events and details of the day. This opens up an opportunity to not let anything slip away from memory as well as welcomes you to key in on where you believe God’s been active. Be sure to review what has inspired you to feel thankful throughout the day, and especially thank God for goodness and generosity. Once reviewed, conclude by responding. This can be done through prayerful conversation, journaling, or whatever best works as your process. The goal of responding is to note concerns, ask God for guidance, ask for forgiveness, resolve to make changes, and the like.

As it goes with any kind of exercising, I’ve had only moderate success in disciplining myself to this life-enriching, faith-edifying practice. But I know it yields great blessing and peace of mind, the kind needed to sleep at night. Like Psalm 4, this way of praying does have a way of becoming a pep-talk … it’s just that we have got to make room for it the way God gives gives us room to breathe and to be glad through all the tight-spots we can find ourselves in. Amen.