The Psalm That Does Not End Well

She has a list now, which is the sort of thing you develop without meaning to.

Everything happens for a reason. God does not waste anything. You would not be who you are without it. He was growing something in you. Look how you can help people now.

Every one of those has been said to her by somebody who loves her, in the last two years, about the same four years, and every single time she has said thank you, and every single time something has closed a little further.

She is thirty five. The four years are hers and she is not going to describe them here. What matters is what has happened since, which is that she has been quietly handed a job by everybody kind to her, and the job is to produce a meaning.

And she cannot do it. She has tried. She has sat down and honestly tried to work out what those four years were for, and she gets nowhere, and then she feels the second thing, which is worse than the first: if there is a meaning and I cannot find it, then I am also failing at recovering.

She found the psalm by accident.

She was reading through, badly, the way you do, and she came into Psalm 88 in the middle and it caught her because of the tone, and she went back and started it again, and read it all the way to the end.

And it does not end well. It does not turn. There is no but at the end. It goes: Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness (Psalm 88:18). That is the last line. That is where the psalm stops, and then the next psalm starts, and nobody comes and fixes it.

She sat at her tiny kitchen table with the book open and the light coming in the way it does at that time of day and read the last verse about four times.

You have been handed the job. Somebody kind told you it was for something, and you have been trying to produce the something ever since, and failing at it has become a second injury laid on top of the first. And there is a psalm in the middle of the Bible that was allowed to end in the dark, and nobody in three thousand years has been permitted to tidy it up.

The psalm that was left alone

I have to be careful here, and I am going to be more careful than anywhere else in this, because there is a version of this that comes with the meaning she is looking for. God was doing this. It was for that. Here is the reason. I am not going to supply one. Scripture does not explain her four years, and manufacturing a reason and attaching God's name to it is precisely what has been done to her fourteen times already.

Psalm 88 is written by a man named Heman the Ezrahite and it is the darkest thing in the Psalter. He says his soul is full of troubles. He says he is counted with them that go down into the pit. He says God's wrath lies hard on him and His waves afflict him. He says, in verse 13, that he cries in the morning, which means he is still praying.

And then it ends. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.

No resolution. No turn. No verse where the sun comes up. It is in the Bible, in the middle, between two psalms that do turn, and God saw fit to preserve it exactly as it was.

You are permitted a stretch that does not resolve into a lesson. That is not a liberty I am extending to you; Psalm 88:18 is the last verse of a canonical psalm and it ends in the dark, and the Holy Spirit who inspired it did not append a paragraph explaining what it was for.

And notice what the psalm does have, because this is not despair. He is still talking to God. Every line of it is addressed. It is the most sustained complaint in Scripture and it never once turns into a complaint about God to somebody else; it is spoken to Him, all the way down, and it stops in the dark still speaking.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18

The job somebody handed her

Now the thing that has actually been happening for two years, which is not the four years.

Fourteen kind people, none of them intending harm, have handed her an assignment. Find the reason. Make it mean something. And when she cannot, the failure lands on her, because nobody who hands out that assignment ever tells you what to do if the answer does not come.

You have never been assigned the work of making your own suffering make sense. Deuteronomy 29:29 says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and that verse draws a line and puts a whole category on His side of it; the Spirit who inspired it drew that line as a relief and not as a refusal.

This is yours right now, at a table with a book open: the right to say I do not know and to stop there. Job 42:3 has Job saying that he uttered what he did not understand, things too wonderful for him which he knew not, and that is the end of his enquiry rather than a stage in it; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) does not require a report.

What she is actually afraid of

Let me name the sentence under two years of trying, because it is not intellectual.

It sounds like this: if there is no meaning, then it was just waste, and I do not know how to live next to four years of waste. That is the fear, and every person who has handed her a reason has been trying, kindly, to save her from it, and it has not worked because the reason was not theirs to give.

You were with God through all four of those years and He never once required them to be productive. Psalm 88:9 has the psalmist saying he has called daily upon God, and the calling is recorded as faithfulness inside a psalm that never resolves; the Holy Spirit who preserved that detail counted the calling and not the outcome.

Fruit is not output, and four unresolved years are where the seam is widest. Output is the meaning: a lesson, a testimony, a way you can help people now. Fruit is what grew on a woman who kept talking to God through years she cannot explain, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that faithfulness, and it does not require an ending.

And I am not going to tell you your four years were for something. I do not know. What can be said, and only this, is that the darkest psalm in the book was allowed to stand without a resolution, and that the man who wrote it was still talking to God on the last line.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes the kettle takes, tell Him one true thing about those years with no meaning attached to it at all. Then stop and let Him have the last word. Nobody grades that, and it does not have to conclude.