Tuesday, October 10th – If It Had Not Been…

Tuesday of the Twenty-Second Week of Ordinary Time – Year 1
Psalm 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126
2 Kings 22:1-13
1 Corinthians 11:2, 17-22
Matthew 9:1-8 

If It Had Not Been…   
Psalm 124

They say that hindsight is 20/20. If you’re like a lot of people, your eyesight isn’t perfect 20/20. You can’t see the world in all its brilliant clarity. So, every day you either place a pair of glasses on your face or you stick little round pieces of plastic directly on your eyeball so that you can see clearly. While corrective lenses work perfectly well for allowing us to physically see where we’re going, they don’t help us when it comes to making life decisions.

In some circumstances, even when we can clearly define a path forward, we aren’t guaranteed that the path will be easy or free from danger. On some level, we all know that tragedy could strike at any moment. So we try to be as prepared as we can. When the chaos does strike, it can be even harder to discern a way forward. We can get so focused on the pressing matters of the here and now that we can’t hardly see.

That is until it’s all over. When the dust settles and the winds stop blowing, we instinctively begin to look back over the previous weeks and months of carnage, and our vision begins to clear up. Identifying the forces of good and evil in past events becomes easier as we move forward from those events.

Psalm 124 is a song that looks back on troubled times in Israel and declares without reservation that they would not have survived without the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob intervening for them. If God were not on their side, they would have been swallowed up alive. They would have been completely swept away by the torrent of evil at their door. Instead, they escaped like a bird dodges the snare of the hunter.

We don’t know the context of this Psalm, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the context, whatever the tragedy that befell Israel or David, whatever the evil that may befall us, it’s always right to look back and confess that it could have been much, much worse had it not been for the protective hand of God. Surely we would have perished if God had not been on our side.

Right now, take a moment and look back on your life at a time when all was not right. Were there people there who offered you aid in your time of trouble? Were there coincidences that seemed to abate the trouble you were in? Could you have made a decision that would have made things much worse? If so, we can name those people, those coincidences, your decision as the work of the hand of God helping you navigate your way. It’s right to give praise and thanks to God for those things. Let us confess with the psalmist, “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth!”

Prayer: Oh God, we confess that if it were not for your strong and protective hand, we would not survive any of the tragedy that befalls us. We give you great praise and thanks for your faithfulness! Amen.