Traveling Light

I think it was Woodie Guthrie who strummed these words several years back:

I’ve been walking that Lincoln Highway
I thought you knowed,
I’ve been hitting that 66,
Way down the road,
Got a heavy load, I got a worried mind,
I’m looking for a woman that’s hard to find,
And I’ve been doing some hard traveling, Lord.

Some songs are more than “tunes”. The lyrics come from the forge of somebody’s life. I guess that's why some songs attach to our minds so strongly. They tell "our story" too.

Ever read Psalm 42? The writer (probably David) has a heavy heart. He throws open the curtains and lets us peer into his pain. He compares his life to that of a deer that has reached the point of exhaustion. He is faint and desperately in need of cool water. As you read the psalm it is clear that he describing more than the proverbially “bad day”. He is in a phase, a funk, a long stretch of road that has disrupted his life in some pretty major ways. His worship is off center. But he wants to stay true to want he knows about God. He isn’t ready to abandon ship. In fact he wills his mind to reach out for the knowledge of God’s power and majesty that has, over time and because of hardship, moved to the recesses of thought. And yet, it is these great thoughts that keep the thread of meaning sewn into the broken pieces of his spirit. He eventually steals away by himself and sits in nature and just listens. Deep calls to deep, he says. It’s more than soft breezes, the sound of water falls, squirrels chirping and clouds floating along. He hears the voice of God in the created order. The beauty and majesty of it all anchors his restless heart to the bedrock of faith. Although enemies hound him and people capitalize on his vulnerability, he continues to reach out for God. On the other end of what had to be a much longer experience than the length of the psalm indicates, he says:
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.
Some time ago I sat and reflected on things I have heard people say over the past year.
I just want to feel something good. I haven’t felt anything good in months.
I wish I had something to look forward to.
I am so bored right now.
Bitterness has become a way of life for me.
I hate my life.
All I do these days is worry.
I can’t remember the last time I smiled because I felt like it.
My involvement in church – if you can call it that – has been basically just showing up.
I crawl to church.
I feel like I’m invisible. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a old water well. I scream for help but
no one can hear me.
The best part of my life is when I go to sleep.
The smallest thing can trigger my anger. My anger takes me out to the darkest places of thought – to places that I used to never think about. I live with a quiet rage.
There’s a lot of heaviness in our world. Like Guthrie says, we do some hard traveling. That’s why I like Psalm 42. It’s so real. It’s us. It’s life in 3D. We know what it’s like to feel the tension between what we know about God and what is happening to us in real time. We, too, pant for flowing streams and want to know…God! You still there? And yet, this psalm annoys us because it doesn’t say “add water and stir”. Holding it together “in faith” is hard work. We pant, cry, wait, agonize, and quite frankly sometimes wonder if our lives are about to fall apart. Worship gets stale. And, the heaviness we feel is beyond “take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

Is your heart embattled right now? Is your spirit heavy? I like verse 4: These things I remember as I pour out my soul... I am thankful for the psalmist’s transparency. I continue to be refreshed by his authenticity and his willingness to pour it all out before the Lord. The old tongue and cheek "rub some dirt on it...pull yourself up by your boot straps" doesn't work so great when we find ourselves on one of those rocky stretches of road. It is in those moments that it's great to know songs like Psalm 42. It can soothe and minister to our restless hearts because we know we’re reading words that were forged in somebody’s life who finished the journey.

Gracious Father, you are the only one who can refresh our hearts. Lift the heaviness from our lives and refresh our spirits with the assurance of your presence and care for us. When we feel the weight of life pressing the joy and strength of faith from our lives, help us to know the journey that is Psalm 42. Help us to know its winding road and the good place that it can take us. We ask this through the One who has walked the road ahead of us…Amen.

Randy Daugherty
Stephenville, Texas