Some wandered in desert wastes,
finding no way to an inhabited town
hungry and thirsty,
their soul fainted within them.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress;
he led them by a straight way,
until they reached an inhabited town.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind.
For he satisfies the thirsty,
and the hungry he fills with good things.
– Psalm 107 –
“We become what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be” – Kurt Vonnegut
It’s hard to tell an honest story about ourselves. Just ask two siblings to tell the story of growing up. There is no objective “truth” to our stories, or maybe just a lot less than we think there is. We like to think that we have “trustworthy memories” – that what we remember is a collection of objective facts about events, mental newspaper clippings from an unbiased source. But memories are weird. Think about the last time you had a fight with someone. You don’t always remember things the way they happened, or perhaps they don’t. Or perhaps y’all share the same facts, but the way that you structure the story is completely different, two different stories created from the same factual events.
Which facts we decide to keep in our story and which facts our brains decide not to retain – that is our sense of self. Our story is our identity. And we have more choices in how we tell our own story than we think we do.
I’m fascinated by the Kurt Vonnegut quote from Slaughterhouse-five: “We become what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” We turn into the story that we tell about ourselves. At a certain point, we stop telling the story and the story starts to tell us.
What I mean is that when we have a certain story structure for our lives, we start to only hold on to events and memories that fit into that structure. We forget things that don’t fit our narrative. It’s not intentional – there just isn’t a mental hook to hang those events on. And so, strangely, how we have decided to tell our story directly determines how we experience our lives.
There is good magic in this, and bad magic in this. Like everything enchantmed, it is wildly powerful, and can tear us apart or heal our souls.
Some sat in darkness and in gloom,
prisoners in misery and in irons…
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he saved them from their distress;
he brought them out of darkness and gloom,
and broke their bonds asunder.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind.
For he shatters the doors of bronze,
and cuts in two the bars of iron.
Psalm 107 is a pattern psalm. All of the psalms have patterns, but 107 sings like a verse and a chorus of your favorite hymn or worship song.
- Things were bad! (various bad things described)
- In our distress, we called to the Lord!
- And the Lord saved us!
- Let us thank the Lord!
This happens four times in Psalm 107. There are a variety of bad things that hit the Psalmist – lost in the wilderness, imprisoned, sick, and lost at sea on a business trip. Each time, the Psalmist describes the event (v. 4-5, 10-12, 17-18, 23-27), gives the exact same distress call (“then they cried to the Lord in their trouble!”), and then – the turn, every time, the same:
and he delivered them from their distress.
and he saved them from their distress.
and he saved them from their distress.
and he brought them out from their distress.
Now, do we really believe that every time something terrible happened, God saved them? I don’t think so. Lots of terrible things happened to the Israelites, the priests and the stonecutters and carpenters and mothers and bakers and even to the kings. Ships went down at sea. People got lost in the wilderness. People were imprisoned unjustly and justly, and suffered. Bad, terrible things happened. We know this because of other parts of Scripture, and we know this because of the witness of our own lives. Bad things happen and good things happen. We don’t get saved every time.
So then we have a choice.
How will we tell our stories?
There is power in choosing to tell stories of redemption.
In Psalm 107, the psalmist gives us a structure for surviving horrible days and years. The Psalmist is a witness to redemption. The Psalmist tells her story as a story of rescue from the depths. Like all our classic hymns, the Psalmist sings in the middle of trouble about the rescue of God.
Here I lay my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.Through many dangers, toils and snares. I have already come;
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far.
And grace will lead me home.God has been faithful,
God will be again
The hymns and the psalms can teach us how to sing our songs.
They can teach us who to “pretend to be.”
Not the fake smiling that we were taught in church. Not “pretending” we’re happy when we’re not. Not lying through our teeth. Not answering “Oh, I’m blessed!” whenever someone asks you how you are. But in practicing telling our stories as stories of God’s movement of redemption. Practicing the pattern of locating ourselves in the story of redemption, even and exactly in the moment of despair.
I know I’ve spent Lent telling everyone who would listen to be honest with the pain and to be honest with God and not to pretend our suffering isn’t real. Wait, what, now we’re supposed to pretend, Laura Jean?
The Psalmist, even in this aggressively positive Psalm 107, doesn’t sugarcoat the wandering, the wilderness, the darkness, the prison, the shipwrecks. Like Paul, listing all the times he has been naked and alone and hungry and imprisoned and shipwrecked, the Psalmist is frank that bullshit happens. A lot. Quite a lot!
The Joel-Osteen-smiling-cheerful religion glosses over the darkness and tries to skip to the end as if the suffering never happened. It gives a language for testimony only after the fact, only after the suffering is over.
The Psalmist gives words for how to speak of God while we are suffering, what language to use to tell our story. Telling our stories not as “cheery positive” but as resurrection, redemption stories – even while we are in the pit.
God saved me in the past, and that is the story that I am still in. I am in God’s story. Here is how the story goes.
“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.”
Again, and again, and again, and yet again. Psalm 107 carries the pattern for our story.
The more we find the patterns for telling our story as redemption, as a series of Ebenezers that testify to the grace of God and salvation in terrible circumstances, the more we will see that story in our lives. The more we choose to tell a story like that, the story that we will start to experience is one of grace and glory.
We become the story we tell. That is a warning, but also a promise. This Lent, fall into the patterns of the psalms, of lament and despair and crying out, and retelling the stories of the grace of God.
Lord, gives us eyes to see Your story. Amen.
