Logos - Psalm 23

When I read this Psalm, the memory that comes back most clearly for me is from over 10 years ago.  I was part of a team from our church that was serving as youth counselors.  We planned a retreat to Spring Heights for our youth and the programming for the weekend was completely centered around this Psalm.  Together, the adults and youth talked about what each line meant – we worked on memorizing it – we had the youth explore it artistically.  The youth’s insights on the Psalm were inspiring to me, but I don’t know if what we – the adults - did made any difference in the lives of the youth who went on the trip.

The Psalm says, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.”  Gary Simpson, who is the senior pastor at Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, provides a great image of this for us.  He explains that the scriptures are dripping with God’s goodness.  God is good before humans are even created.  God goes in front of us before we arrive anywhere.  The Hebrew word used in the Psalm for the word prepare is arak – and it also means “to arrange.”  So, wherever we are going, God’s goodness has gone before us, making the arrangements ahead of time – bringing light in darkness.  Preparing the place for us.  God’s mercy, according to Simpson, “is made necessary and non-negotiable soon after humans were created.”  Our sin makes God’s mercy necessary, and God moves behind us, in God’s mercy, with extravagant generosity, cleaning up the messes we make.

 So, I don’t know if the work we adult counselors did made any difference to the youth, but I do know, and I can rest in the assurance, that God went before us, and brought light and goodness into what we did, and God followed us, fixing what we did wrong, in God’s boundless mercy.