A Light in the Darkness

  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him,   and he will make straight your paths. Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV             These wise words of counsel harkens back to the wisdom of Proverbs 1:7, and thus to the very foundation of wisdom itself. God is at the beginning of all wisdom, as He is at the center of all understanding. Failing to acknowledge God in all our ways is an act of willful ignorance, that will necessarily send our path in life here and there and everywhere as we try to find some way apart from the cardinal directions. We will subject ourselves to futility in reliance on our incomplete understanding. We shall move without going anywhere.             God’s understanding is alone perfect, and perfectly perfect, only He knows the way in its entirety. When He makes the path straight, it is to say that He makes it clear, and by this we must mean that He makes a path. The path in itself is a great ad

  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 ESV                 The very first character introduced in the Bible is God, and He enters the narrative at center stage. Rather, He is at the center of everything when everything else enters around Him. It is God who begins the cosmos, and sets in motion the story of which we are all a part. He performs the initial action, with purpose. He begins, and He continues. He is the first to be in the story for it is His story, He started it, and will see it through. He is by right, and by all reason, and by revelation at the very center of all things. He shall be the central figure when this story is ended, and the better story begun.                 This centrality is established in the first sentence of the Bible, it is the first demand of right theology, and therefore of right thinking and of right living. The demand is made explicit in the first and greatest commandment that all our beings be directed to God (De

  Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,   my salvation and my God. Psalm 42:5-6A ESV             It fast becoming cliché, rightly and well, to say that the Church has neglected the practice of lament particularly in her hymnody. No one likes to taste the bitter moments of life, but what is bitter to the tongue maybe found sweet in the stomach. Our tears may not be the favorite meal, but they do provide for us something that cannot be got in any other source of sustenance.             The psalmist has found one of the good things in the bitter moments. For even as he is caught in the throws of inner confusions, and locked in battle against despair, and being tossed around in the waves of it all he is freed from the tyrannies of sensation.   He may not feel the nearness of God, nor even evidence it in his life, but he recognizes the truth of God even still. His hope is objective, not subjective. He will