I was a teenager when I first started reading the Book of Psalms.
I was going through a particularly hard time and I found the Psalms to be filled with raw emotion, deep despair, and in the midst of all that … hope and unflinching faith.
Psalm 71:20-21 reads: “Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up. You will increase my honor and comfort me once again.”
And in that same Psalm a few verses earlier: “But as for me, I will always have hope.”
It is one of the things that I love most about the Bible. That even though it tells of events that happened thousands of years ago, the true essence of faith carries through the millennia.
Though separated by hundreds or thousands of generations, we can still understand the trials of Job, of David, of Isaiah and Jeremiah. It makes their faith more real that they suffered too.
There is not a person in the Bible, from Adam to Jesus, who does not suffer, who does not at some point cry out or feel grief settle into their soul.
But through that all, their faith is constant, through that all, they never cease believing in God even though, like in the case of Job, they may question His actions.
The Psalms are the poetry of faith. They are the songs of hope. Even in the midst of unending pain and suffering, there is always a light, there is always a way home, and there is always hope.
The poet Alfred Tennyson wrote a long, extended poem entitled “In Memoriam,” after the death of his best friend. In the poem Tennyson questions God, questions his faith, questions others perceptions of his faith and of his friend. Even though Tennyson’s grief is intense, he ends the poem with a declaration of faith.
He writes: “That God, which ever lives and loves/One God, one law, one element/And one far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves.”
It is an acknowledgement of God’s unending love and a suggestion that no matter what we do in this life, we are forever moving toward Him and He is moving to us.
My guess is that Tennyson was a reader of the Psalms too.
Life will always be a struggle. And there will be times when that struggle may feel more than we can bear. And it is those times that I will turn to the Psalms to be reminded that I am not the first to have suffered and that those who suffered far greater things I stayed strong in faith and believed always in hope.
