Things Too Great for Me

There's a thing your mind does at about eleven at night that it would never do at ten in the morning.

It goes back over a conversation. Not to learn anything from it, because you've already learned whatever there was. It just runs it again. What they meant by that. What you should have said. Whether the tone at the end meant something. You're not solving it. You're chewing it, and some part of you believes that if you chew long enough you'll finally get to the bottom and be able to rest.

You won't. There isn't a bottom. That's the whole problem.

Psalm 131 is three verses long. It's one of the shortest chapters in the Bible, and I think it's there for people at eleven at night.

“O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” (Psalm 131:1, ESV)

Occupy myself with. The word underneath that one is about walking around inside something. Pacing. The psalmist isn't saying he never thinks about hard things. He's saying he's stopped living inside the ones he was never going to figure out.

Some of what keeps us up is genuinely too great for us. Why a good person got the diagnosis. What God is doing with a season that has gone on much longer than it should have. Whether the decision you made four years ago was the right one, which is a question with no possible answer because the other road was never driven and never will be.

We treat that pacing like it's diligence. Like a serious person would keep working the problem. But there's a difference between wrestling something through and walking laps inside it, and most of us know which one we're doing.

“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.” (Psalm 131:2, ESV)

Not a nursing child. A weaned one. The difference is the whole verse.

A nursing child on its mother is calm, but it's calm because it is getting something. Take the thing away and the calm goes with it. A weaned child has been through the hard part already. It has done the crying and come out the other side, and now it can be held without needing anything to happen. It's just glad to be there.

That's the quiet the psalm is after. Not the peace of having your requests met. The peace of being with someone when nothing is currently being handed to you.

Which is harder, and better, and takes longer to get.

I'd guess most of us are still at the nursing stage with God more than we'd like to admit. Calm as long as the thing is coming. Restless the moment it isn't. And the weaning feels like abandonment while it's happening, when in fact it's the only way anybody ever learns that the presence was the point.

“O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore.” (Psalm 131:3, ESV)

He works out his own quiet in two verses and immediately hands it to everybody else. That's how it usually goes. The person who has stopped pacing is the one you want in the room.

So take whatever you've been walking laps inside and set it down where it belongs. Not solved. Just handed over, to someone it isn't too great for.

Then be quiet a while. You're allowed.