Saturday, March 9
God Remembers That We Are Dust
Scripture: Psalm 103:8-18
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.

Poetry:
Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers
by Gail Wronsky

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced
with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse

ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system—
not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,

the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence
excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew

who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if
the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe

in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of
corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness

by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not
as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive,

correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown
dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching

out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and
nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy

me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind
soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see.

The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower
of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously

over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper?
Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.

YAHWEH REMEMBERS WE ARE DUST

What is the wider landscape in which you see your life played out?

Notice the ‘magical realism’ of Andrew Wyeth’s painting. His style offers us a way to see, even miniscule details (e.g., blades of grass, a woman’s hair) seem illuminated; they are made to be noticed. It’s as if the seemingly ‘ordinary’ is imbued with something sacramental, an unveiling of the poetic, the longing for the 'something more’ of our human experience.

In Wyeth’s painting, we enter a story that is unfolding: Christina’s World. The woman is Wyeth’s neighbor in Maine, according to the Museum of Modern Art. She’s crawling through the grass, crippled by a neuromuscular disease.

What might the Holy Spirit desire to highlight about the realism of your everyday, ordinary life?

Awestruck wonder paints this painting with a kind of earthly praise. Christina is "limited physically but by no means spiritually,” Wyeth observes in a letter to a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”

Wyeth marvels at his neighbor’s spirit. For spirit is not reduced or subservient to mere matter; it-wills-forward, even crawling with intentionality.

Do you view your own frailty and finitude as something to ‘escape' or interrelated with your own life journey? Enter a world of grace.

David, in Psalm 103, locates the human condition in a ‘God-bathed world’ (Dallas Willard), a ‘sacramental tapestry’ (Hans Boersma), an environment full of praise for Yahweh’s action, knowing, and presence. A call to praise is what ‘book-ends’ this Psalm (from vs. 1 to 22).

The Psalmist is trying to get our attention; how ‘praise’ and ‘being praiseworthy’ is integral to how things truly are. “We delight to praise what we enjoy,” observes C.S. Lewis, “it completes the enjoyment.”

How does your world-and-life view of reality measure up to the realism of the Psalmist?

The call to praise Yahweh is so intensely real that the Psalmist summons his own soul, the depth of his being, to “praise His holy name.” Anything less would be irresponsible and out-of-touch with reality.

For the praise of Yahweh’s name is responsive to who Yahweh is and what Yahweh does. His character and deeds are profoundly revelatory. The Psalmist praises not an abstract object, not some grand idea, but Yahweh Himself and the “surely goodness and mercy” (cf. Ps. 23) that flows from revelation of who Yahweh is.

The call to praise is punctuated by an invitation to remember. “Do not forget his kind and faithful deeds!” (vs. vs. 2, 7). In a world marked by a cacophony of noise, distraction, and temptation to act as if God is not real or present . . . we are invited to remember, and keep on remembering! That is the indispensable key not only for surviving but truly thriving.

How do you see your world, the world that you inhabit in 2019? Is it seen from the advantage point of Yahweh’s protective and salvific ways? Is your story realized from the super-abundant kindness of His-story? (vs. 2-7).

Squarely in the middle of Psalm 103, it’s like the Psalmist witnesses a sonic boom going off in the cosmos, echoing throughout heaven and earth (vs. 11-13): “Yahweh is compassionate and merciful; he is patient and demonstrates great royal love”!! (vs. 7).

That audacious, revelatory fact of grace utterly disrupts all earthly life and the mechanistic world of earnings and self-justification; it deconstructs entitlement mindsets preoccupied with “my merit unleashes divine favor and presence.”

Deistic being is so much safer, tame, controlled, calculated, yet so lifeless, aloof, and even justifiably apathetic. Yahweh, whose name is so very holy, is utterly incapable of being deistic.

From whose perspective do you see the temporary, fleeting nature of your life?

The bold, even ‘risky’ movement of Yahweh deepens with further profundity in this Psalm: His covenant-ing compassion and patience is not in spite of our frailty, finitude and fallenness but with knowing what we are made of: clay! Clay cannot self-justify; it cannot realize its own potential. It needs a Potter.

The towering, loyal, royal love of Yahweh spells covenant, and covenant exceedingly supersedes our capacity to be ‘loveable’, or even presentable as loveable. What a profound mystery of divine intimacy! Yahweh, the praiseworthy, comes toward human beings – clay! - as a father would have compassion on his children (vs. 7). Absolutely stunning!

The realism gets even more intense, more audacious than the image of Wyeth’s Christina: Our fleeting, mortal days on this earth are like grass or even like a flower blown by an uprooting wind, easily dislocated, decentered, fleeting, disappearing . . . forgotten (vs. 14, 15). But Yahweh remembers!

The good news then goes full throttle: His remembrance is our dignity. He crowns us with His loyal love and compassion (vs. 4). With the Christmas carol, “He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”

Prayer:
Praise the Lord, all that he has made, in all the regions of His Kingdom! Praise the Lord, O my soul!! (vs. 22).
Amen 

Joseph E. Gorra
Writer and Educator
Founder /Director of Veritas Life Center

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.