Singing a New Song

The Psalm for worship this week is Psalm 98. Here's the first verse; I love it.

"O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things."

This week, I have been singing a new song in my heart and soul, and I'm not exactly sure where it came from. The whole "platelet situation" combined with a variety of other current life challenges had led me to feeling internally perplexed and question-filled over the last few months. We all have times like that, right? Can a girl get an "Amen"?

The last song my heart was singing was a little bit of a downer. Something like 3.5 months of the overall feeling, "I might be a pastor, but that doesn't mean I'm not completely confused about You, God." It was a slow, slightly bitter kind of song, and would've been at home on Alanis Morisette's "Jagged Little Pill" album.

Now, though, a new song is being written on my heart. Something like, "The challenges may not disappear, but I know You're here, God, and I know You care."

I'm thankful that in the midst of the challenges and changes of life, we're not left singing the same song permanently.

The Psalms, and in fact the whole Bible, are very emotionally diverse - the words of the Bible span the whole range of human emotion. There are Psalms that are filled with emotions of confusion, frustration, and fear. There are other Psalms filled with joy and happiness and celebration. I'm so thankful that at some point in history, people started writing down these words so they could be preserved!

Psalm writing was a little like journal-keeping or blog-entry-writing. Communities and individuals wrote down a record of how they were feeling about God's activity in the world. Sometimes their songs were slow jamz, sometimes they contained some heavy-metal style rage, and sometimes they were praise & worship hymns. For thousands of years, no matter how a person was feeling, they could read the Psalms and know they weren't alone.

We can be REAL about whatever we're feeling. And we can know that the world will keep turning, and believe it or not, there will be a day when we can start singing a new song.