She found out in a car park, from a stranger, in about four seconds.
There was a woman on a stall outside the shop selling something for a school trip, and this woman looked at her while she was getting her purse out and said, entirely at random, in the way strangers occasionally do: and what are you believing God for at the minute?
And she opened her mouth to answer and there was nothing there.
Not a blank in the sense of forgetting. A blank in the sense of an empty shelf. She could have told that woman what she was believing God for on behalf of eleven other people without pausing: the scan, the tribunal, the boy, the couple in the second year of it. Instant, detailed, and she means every word of all of them.
For herself, nothing. Not a thing. There was no list because there had not been a list for a long time and she could not tell you when it stopped.
She said something polite and bought a raffle ticket and got in the car and sat there.
And what came to her, sitting there, was a memory from about nine years ago of a notebook she used to keep. It had two columns and she had ruled them herself with a ruler because she is like that. The left column was them. The right column was me. And she remembered how full the right column used to be, and not with big things either: a friend to laugh with, the thing with her back, a week away, that awkwardness with her sister.
She could not remember throwing the notebook out. She could not remember deciding to stop the right column. There was no moment. She had simply become a woman with one column, over about five years, the way a person becomes forty.
And here is the part that has sat on her since. When she thought about starting the right column again, right there in the car, the feeling that came was not hope. It was embarrassment. As though wanting something for herself were slightly greedy, and slightly unprofessional, and probably the first symptom of a person going soft.
Read who the psalm is addressed to
Psalm 103 is the one everybody uses at other people. Bless the LORD, O my soul, forget not all his benefits. It gets read over congregations constantly, and it is one of the most quoted passages in the book, and here is the thing nobody points out.
It is not addressed to a congregation. Not one line of it. From the first word it is a man speaking to himself.
Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.Psalm 103:5
Thy mouth. Thy youth. The whole psalm is one person turning round and preaching the benefits of God directly at his own soul, out loud, by name, and refusing to let his soul get away with forgetting.
So hear this over you in a car park. You are on the list. Not as staff, and not as a footnote, but as the actual person the psalm was written for. That is not my encouragement; it is who His word is addressed to in Psalm 103, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a pronoun like thy and lands it on the one woman in the car who has been quietly filing herself under management.
Now look at what has been going on in the right column.
It closed itself without a decision, which is how the important ones go. What happened is that every time you had a need of your own it arrived at the same desk as eleven other people's, and yours was always the least urgent thing on that desk, because yours always is. Do that for five years and you do not become humble. You become a woman who has trained herself out of asking.
And then it dressed itself up. That is the bit I want to take off you. The embarrassment you felt in the car is not conviction and it is not modesty. Nothing in Scripture teaches a servant of God to be sheepish about being satisfied by Him, and the Holy Spirit has never once made a person feel unprofessional for wanting something good.
He satisfies. That is a present tense verb about God's ordinary conduct, and it is aimed at the mouth of the one doing the reading. You are being satisfied with good things right now, in a way that has nothing to do with what you can currently perceive, because His word states it as what God does and not as what He might do for the deserving, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a woman who has forgotten she has a mouth of her own.
There is one more thing in that verse and it is not decoration. Thy youth is renewed. That is a word for a thing coming back that had gone. It is not a promise about age. It is a description of a God who restores the part of a person that goes flat first, which in someone who carries others is nearly always expectancy.
You are allowed to want things. You are allowed to want them out loud, by name, on a page with a ruled line down the middle. His word puts the wanting and the being satisfied in the same sentence and never once apologizes for it, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind you tutting while you write in the right column.
Let me say one plain thing before we go on, because this message is for someone who has been running on nothing. If it has gone past flatness lately, if there have been thoughts in that car you would not repeat to anybody, please do not carry that on your own today. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one real human being who can sit with you before tonight. That is not going soft. That is the right column being written in, and God is the one who put people in the world to help fill it.
The right column is not greed.
It never was, and the shame that came up in the car has no standing whatsoever, because the psalm you have preached at other people for eleven years has always been a man saying these things to himself.
You have not gone soft. You have gone quiet in the one place that God specifically speaks to, and He is speaking to it now: the mouth, the satisfying, the youth that comes back. That is the language of the verse and it is aimed straight at the reader.
Nothing is asked of you here. You do not have to make the list tonight, or find the notebook, or work out what you want. Sit still, and be the person Psalm 103 is written to, which you have been the whole time.
You are the one that psalm is addressed to, and you were the one it was addressed to through the whole year you stopped expecting anything. It is written that He satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's (Psalm 103:5), and the you in it is singular. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes a psalm about somebody else into a psalm about you.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in whatever voice you have got today. Not one line here is my idea about you. Every one of them stands on His word, and it is the Holy Spirit and never the wording who makes a spoken sentence land in a person. The authority in them was given to you by Christ, who is in you, and it does not run out when you do. Speak to the thing, not about it. And whatever He does with the year ahead, He does in His own way and His own time.
- Habit of leaving myself off the list, you are not humility and you never were. Psalm 103 says who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, and thy is the one reading it, so the whole psalm was always aimed at the person holding the book.
- Embarrassment that came up in me at the thought of wanting something, in the name of Jesus you are put out of this car. Nothing in Scripture teaches a servant to be sheepish about being satisfied by God, and a woman who trained herself out of asking was never being modest.
- God, You are the One who satisfies and the One who renews what has gone flat. Your Spirit is bringing back the expectancy I did not notice leaving, and I am writing in the right column again with my own name at the top.
Psalm 103:5
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