Footsteps unseen
What if we feel that God has failed us and is more problem than solution? Do we stuff it or honestly tell him how we feel? This psalm models honesty but in such a way that God is glorified and our faith is built up.
1 I cry out to God in distress—
cry out for him to hear me.
2 On the day when trouble hit
I searched for the Lord.
All night long I stretched out my hands to you
refusing to be consoled.
3 I thought about God and groaned.
The more I thought about him
the more overwhelmed I felt.
4 You’ve kept me from closing my eyes
I’m so distraught I can’t speak.
5 I think back to other times
many years ago.
6 I remember my song in the night
and reflect, asking myself:
7 “Is YHWH’s rejection final?
Will he never smile on me again?
8 Is his unfailing love gone for good?
Are his promises forever null and void?
9 Has God forgotten how to be gracious?
Has his anger shut down his compassion?” Selah
10 Then I said, “How disastrous for me
that the Most High’s power to rescue
has run out!”
11 I call to mind what you’ve done, YHWH
and recall your miracles from long ago.
12 I recount your achievements
and reflect on all you’ve done.
13 Your ways are holy, God.
What god could possibly rival our God?
14 You’re the God who did miracles
that displayed your power to the nations.
15 Stretching out your strong arm
you redeemed your people—
Jacob and Joseph’s descendants. Selah
16 When the waters saw you, God
when the waters saw you, they recoiled
even the briny deep shuddered.
17 The clouds poured down water
the skies thundered
your arrows flashed on every side.
18 Your thunder rolled and crashed
your lightning bolts lit up the world
the earth trembled and shook.
19 Your path traversed the sea—
you strode right through the surging waters
yet your footsteps were unseen.
20 You led your people like a flock
under the care of Moses and Aaron.
This psalm’s jarringly different halves have made some label it a mishmash of clashing psalms. Alternatively, we can see it as the psalmist’s throwing her life’s contradictions—how things are versus how they “should be”—at God and asking him to reconcile them.*
Since he’s allowed her troubles, the psalmist credits God with her grief and insomnia and questions her deepest Torah beliefs—namely, that he’s faithful, gracious, compassionate, and holy. The glory days are gone, and she wonders if God has cut her off and reneged on his promises, allowing his anger to veto his love. With all her questions crying for answers, she concludes that he’s no longer there for her. Then without missing a beat, she holds up what she knows of God from the Exodus event. She knows that he’s powerful, compassionate, holy and, yes, incomparably mysterious—his footsteps being altogether untraceable.
So the psalmist honestly faces her grief and pain, holding her lived experience up beside what scripture teaches without forcing any false resolution of the two. She thus models holding onto God when we feel like letting go, and yet doing so in such a way that we lay our case before him and ask him to resolve the tension between our deepest griefs and our faith in who he is. Jesus urges us to do the same in his parable of the widow and the unjust judge, in Luke 18:1-8. The psalmist doesn’t know how to make everything fit. But since God is the only judge she has recourse to, she refuses to let her disappointment and grief redefine God. And in so doing, she invites us to do likewise.
Thank you that, holy as you are, God, you aren’t threatened by my honest doubts. I think of all you’ve done and revealed yourself to be, especially in the greater Exodus—Jesus’ cross. Help me hold my hurts against its truth till you resolve the tension between my experience and my faith in you. Amen.
In your free moments today, mediate on this truth:
Your path traversed the sea—
you strode right through the surging waters
yet your footsteps were unseen.
* I imagine the psalmist here as a woman of faith, like Miriam, Deborah, Hanna, or the Virgin Mary (see further, my answer to the question: Who wrote the psalms?).
