I have been reading The Message of the Psalms by Walter Brueggemann. I was reading a Psalm of personal lament (Psalm 13). Walter Brueggemann labels it: a psalm of disorientation. Have you felt blind and alone in your need, past or present? In the first 4 verses, the lament of loneliness and deep need is unmistakable. (Please read it!)

The gap between the first two sections (vs 1-4) and the third section (vs 5 & 6) catches my attention. In the top two stanzas the psalmist accuses God and asks big questions about God’s absence, as well as pleads for God's movement. In the third stanza, the voice changes dimensionally. In that gap between pleading and unfailing love, much seems to happen that the psalmist does not mention. If you think the psalmist just shrugged and pushed on cynically acknowledging that God is unknowable and distant, I understand that need.

I want to offer a different thought, though, that I have been mulling. We humans have such great need to be seen and heard. I think the cynicism can be about protecting oneself from the scariness of our own deep desire. We were made and long to be truly seen and heard with compassion but what if that doesn’t happen. The “what if that doesn’t happen” is that “waiting in disorientation” (Brueggemann, p. 59). I think that huge shift between the second and third stanza is exactly that. I don’t know how long the psalmist had to wait however, the psalmist was seen and heard to such a depth it brought a reorientation to light and life.

Today, I encourage you to be a bearer of God to others by giving the gift of seeing and hearing others deeply. We all have deep need of these gifts in this time and place. It reorients us in this world.

—Dianne Morgan