Thursday, March 20th, 2020
By Rebekah LeMon
Psalm for the Day: Psalm 23:4
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me.
Psalm 23 is one of our “go-to” prayers. Even if we don’t read or recite it often, it lives in our memories as a picture of God sheltering and delivering and providing for us.
One of my great-grandmothers had dementia before her death and we didn’t know from one day to the next what she would recognize. She often took my dad’s hand in hers, mistaking him for her long-dead husband, Jack. She’d ask me to go fetch something from her dining room hutch, though she was in an assisted living facility. One day, she asked us to say the 23rd psalm with her. We encircled her bed, held hands, and followed her lead as she said every word of the psalm in the King James Version. I was a teenager at the time, and it amazed me that while the present had become a strange land for her—a dark valley, even—every word of the psalm was at-the-ready. I don’t know what she saw ahead of her. Maybe she asked for the psalm because she couldn’t see what was next. But I do know that she needed to connect from a deep place. The comfort of this prayer was real and it brought light to her darkness.
In verse 4, the psalmist is talking to God (“you are with me, your rod and staff comfort me”). The psalmist says so much in this one verse:
Thanks, God, for being with me!
I believe, God, that you are always with me.
Stay, won’t you please, God? I need you to be with me.
You being with me, God—this gives me comfort stronger than my fear; you being with me lets me walk forward when I don’t know the way.
God, I know that darkness and valleys and even death will be part of my journey, but I also know that you are guiding me all the while.
Our world has suddenly become a strange land to us. We find ourselves in shadow, unsure about our next steps. We are isolated and need to connect from a deep place. So today we reach into our memories and pray this verse of this psalm together, remembering, claiming, taking comfort, and thanking our God for always being with us as we walk.
One of my favorite songs is a reminder that we are bound together as we walk through “the darkness and the mist.” It is a kind of prayer that God would light our darkness—James Taylor’s Shed A Little Light. This version is James singing with the Lowcountry Voices choir in support of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC during another dark time in our country’s shared experience. Shed a little light, O Lord. Amen.
