“In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice.
In the morning, I lay my requests before you, Lord, and wait in expectation.”

We all have situations we care about that we cannot care for. Our hearts break as this friend shares about a family crisis and that friend shares about a personal struggle and the news reminds us of the traumas in the rest of the world.

Good storytelling would identity specific examples. Good storytelling would draw you in with details. But you already know the details of the stories waiting for you on your screen. You already know the loop that is in your head at 3:00am and sitting on the stair step between you and your 6:15am coffee.

Some of us, maybe you, want to solve it, want to fix it, want to rescue. We want desperately to relieve the pain, to reduce conflict, to bring justice. We weigh alternatives endlessly, we rehearse the speeches we would give.

In David’s journal, he describes one of his ways to handle those moments.

As we read the rest of that journal entry, which we know as Psalm 5, we see that he is as surrounded by evil, arrogant, lying people as we are. And he calls for their destruction. Which, to our ears, feels both a little awful and mostly honest. And what we know from his life is that God showed him that sometimes he was part of the solution and often he was part of the problem.

But these moments happened in the context of this morning conversation, where David was honest with God about his concerns and complaints and his cries for mercy.

It’s a good place to start.

“In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice.
In the morning, I lay my requests before you, Lord, and wait in expectation.”

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from a few years back.