Last week, I wrote about the disorientation many graduates may be experiencing in this wild season.
With the swirl of May activity and the whirl of concomitant emotions, I’ve enjoyed some sweet restoration sitting still, closing my eyes, and listening to the lovingly sung prayers of Sandra McCracken’s new album, Psalms.
Underneath each picture is the link to the related psalm song from Sandra McCracken.
Tis the season – graduation invites are dropping in my mailbox like flies on watermelon juice, so I am re-visiting some of my previous thoughts on the season.
(This year, our third child, second daughter is graduating from college — and getting married 3 weeks later, and moving, and starting a new job….! So, once again, I want to write some new thoughts, but it turns out the old ones still apply — and I have to make a day-trip to our youngest son’s college today, so…we’re returning to 2013.
I want to write some new thoughts about graduation, I really do.
But the fact is, I have to figure out how to print return address labels for his invitations, go to the post office to get the “additional postage required” because I didn’t know the invitations we ordered were an “odd-size,” and buy more laundry detergent, because our household is again filled with kids who have laundry (and do it themselves).
Human experience includes those dangerous and difficult times of dislocation and disorientation when the sky does fall and the world does come to an end.” Walter Brueggemann, on the Psalms
I was reading this great Brueggemann quote this morning, and it hit me. My daughter (and every other senior) is disoriented. Please don’t hear what I’m not saying — it’s not like she’s doing crazy things like wrapping the school up with caution tape or lying around the house all day watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls (well, she is doing that!).
It’s just that she, and every other senior, has arrived at one of those times when a world has come to an end.
I’ve been focusing on how disorienting it is for me to have my third of four graduate from high school, but this morning I decided to turn the tables and think about what the seniors are wondering. Here are six questions disoriented graduates may be asking:
For the graduates and their parents, siblings, and friends, reading and praying the Psalms of orientation and disorientation remind us that in the midst of a season of uncertainty, God’s unchanging love and all-knowing plans bring a sense of security.
A search for a quotation reference today hooked me back into the best book I ever read on emotions and God. My copy of Cry of the Soul, by Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III, which I first purchased at a conference in 1997, bears the tattering and teeth marks left by a chocolate lab named Gracie. Somehow that seems appropriate for a work that invites us to take the tears and tears of our soul to the Lord and shows us how that’s exactly what many of the Psalmists do. Listen to this small portion on fear:
“The Psalms, and the Bible generally, extol a type of fear that God greatly desires to instill in us. It is the fear of the Lord. ‘The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in nothing but his unfailing love” (Psalm 147:11).
What are some Psalms you turn to to express emotion or when you are dealing with fear?
Fear distorts our perception of ourselves so that we seem weaker than we really are. It distorts the size of our problems so that they seem huge and undefeatable. But perhaps most significantly, fear distorts our picture of God. God seems weak, uninvolved, or uncaring in the midst of our troubles. After all, we think, if he were strong and concerned, he would not leave us in this mess.
Fear reverses reality by making evil seem all-conquering, and God impotent. But God is not impotent. The psalms bombard us with images of his power. He is a king (Psalm 47), a warrior (18:7–15), a rock (31:2), and a fortress (46:7, 11). They also fill our minds with pictures of his goodness, compassion, and mercy. He is the shepherd (Psalm 23) and a loving mother (Psalm 131).
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