Misery to Music---Order from Chaos

 

Deuteronomy 26:7

Psalm 119 (The heading of each section)

Lamentations 1-4 (the heading of each section)

Psalm 69

Matthew 5:5

Is anyone else a list maker?  I  have a better trip to the grocery store, a more productive cleaning day, a more organized Christmas morning if I'm working from a list.  When I worked at the Flower Patch years ago, I was in charge of organizing the lists of deliveries for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.  I formulated a system that divided the deliveries by the direction they were headed in or out of town.  Then I would call each recipient to confirm the delivery time.  Upon confirmation, I would mark through the name and address with a yellow crayon.  When the delivery was loaded onto the truck, I would mark through it with an orange crayon.  When the driver returned with a report of a completed delivery, I marked through it with a blue crayon.  If a customer called for an update on the status of her delivery, I could easily look at my list and tell by my color coding system where it was.  It brought some order out of the chaos that is a holiday in a flower shop!

We are on our third component of lament--expressing our grief, sorrow, and regret.  We have cried out, we have identified God as the only trustworthy target of our lament.  Now that we are ready to lay it all before God, we likely feel overwhelmed.  Our minds may go blank, or our thoughts may come flooding in so fast we can't speak them fast enough.  The Bible gives us permission to make lists, to organize our thoughts into some template.  Our main scripture for this week, Deuteronomy 26:1-11, makes a list in verse 7.  "The LORD heard our cry and saw our misery, hardship, and oppression."  Other versions use the words toil and affliction.  Psalm 119 is organized alphabetically (As we learned in our The Aleph-Tav of Psalm 119 study!)  Lamentations 1-4  is also organized alphabetically, with each chapter having a section for each letter of the Hebrew Alphabet.  (This is listed for you in the CSB version of the Bible.  If you don't have one, you can find it on the youversion app so you can better see the layout.) Psalm 69 is just one of many where the Psalmist, often David, lays out all of his complaints before God.  

It's rewarding to make a list.  But isn't it embarrassing to make a list of our needs to give to someone else? We want to handle things ourselves. " I want to make the list, I want to mark things off."  It's humbling to admit that we can't put a checkmark beside each item.  We can't bring order out of our chaos.  But God can. Jesus says in Matthew 5 "Blessed are the humble."  It's GOOD to humble ourselves, to bring our list to God and --as long and as pitiful as they might be--let them go.  He has heard, He has seen, and He will rescue.  The way God fulfills our laundry list of regrets, grief, and sorrow may not be the way we would do it, but it will always be exactly right and exactly right on time.