Canter Bridge

What was I thinking …?

We ask ourself the impossible question when our idiocy has come under the irrefutable light of day.

I was a fool. I was deluded. Distracted. Or drunk. Or stupid.

It is every believer’s nightmare, to have been wrong about everything. Regardless of the ideology that has claimed heart,  mind, or wallet—faithfully secular or conventionally religious—the wolf at the door is to have been simply wrong. Because faith goes to the root of things, to be proven wrong about our core conviction is to have been wrong about everything else as well.

Game over.

What were we thinking?

The psalmist knows this modern fear, which like most hopes and anxieties turns out to be ancient, venerable, and shared.

O my God, in you I trust; let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me. Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. (Psalm 25:2–3 ESV)

In the language of the psalms, to be ‘put to shame’ is to be publicly exposed as an idiot. Reality slaps a guy down at moments like this, reduces the whole, careful trajectory of one’s life to an orderly sequence of mistakes. Worst of all, it does so publicly, where people joke and jeer.

People scoff at such fools. The biblical literature is more honest than modern pieties about how much it hurts to be laughed at. How deep the remorse, how helpless it feels when torn from the beach by shames’s riptide.

The writer of Psalm 25 pleads not to suffer this fate, not to have the floor cut out from under him.

Then, having voiced his longing, he settles into the thing that experience has taught him: ‘None who wait for YHWH shall be put to shame.’

This is the assured result of his life to date: YHWH, alone among the objects of human confidence, does not let this happen to his own. Does not finally disappoint. Does not stand passively by while reality shatters the basis of his sons’ and his daughters’ lives.

In this, the biblical witness claims on our behalf, YHWH is incomparable.

It is the scheming, the hypocritical, and the malicious who find the tables turned on them, the psalmist reassures us. The tide of shame might knock us down, soak us to the bone, dazzle our brains.

But, waiting for YHWH, we rise to live another day.

Resilience takes its place among the underrated virtues that one quietly acquires as he trusts in YHWH. The humble, trusting waiter learns to understand a thousand misfortunes as potholes along the marathon’s route.

But YHWH comes through, Jesus saves, created reality survives its trial. We wait, with a certain uncanny peace, for the final result.