Moods

As the deer pants for streams of water,

    so my soul pants for you, my God.
² My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
    When can I go and meet with God?
³ My tears have been my food
    day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
    “Where is your God?”
⁴ These things I remember
    as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
    under the protection of the Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
    among the festive throng.

 

⁵ Why, my soul, are you downcast?
    Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
    for I will yet praise him,
    my Savior and my God.

 

Psalm 42:1-5

 

Would you describe yourself as a moody person? Up one day, down the next?

 

Whoever wrote Psalm 42 might well have done so. Twice in this psalm (and then once more in the next) he puts to himself the same question: Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?

 

There’s nothing at all unusual about low moods in the psalms (or any other parts of the Bible, come to that), but very often the writer links them with either a strong personal sense of sin and guilt (eg Psalm 51), or with grief after news of a defeat or other setback for Israel as a nation (eg Psalm 44).

 

But Psalm 42 is rather different. There seems to be no specific reason why he feels the way he does: he’s just thoroughly down – and can’t quite put his finger on why. He has the faith to call God “my Rock”, but still feels forgotten by him (verse 9). It reminds me of a powerful line in a poem by Shakespeare when he is in a similar frame of mind: “with what I most enjoy contented least” (Sonnet 29). I imagine that even those of us who reckon to be pretty positive and cheerful by temperament know that feeling, when even our greatest pleasures somehow seem flat and stale.

 

(Some people, of course, suffer with clinical depression, which is far more than just feeling low and may well need professional help. Could that be the psalmist’s situation? Yes or no, such people need all the love, support and prayer we can offer them – and not just to be told to “snap out of it” or “pull yourself together”.)

 

Various things are worth bearing in mind.

 

First, low moods are normal.

 

As I’m writing, it’s the tail-end of March, and I got up this morning just as it was starting to get light. Light enough to see that it was raining hard; and I involuntarily groaned under my breath, “Oh, not again!” (It’s no accident that we sometimes speak of being “under the weather”, is it?) It didn’t help when a little later I picked up the paper and read about the large quantities of sewage being pumped into Britain’s rivers; or saw the word “crisis” applied yet again to the National Health Service; or saw news of the horrors happening in Gaza, or Ukraine, or Myanmar, or Sudan, or wherever; or saw predictions about “schools at breaking point”; or when, having turned to prayer, I called to mind the many people in my life who are grappling with long-term illness.

 

These things are raw realities – and they can’t be cheerily fobbed off with, “Well, at least it’s a good thing that God’s in control!” Try telling that to the parents who can’t feed their children, or the person struggling with terminal sickness. Somebody wrote a book a few years ago called “It’s OK not to be OK”. I don’t know if they were a Christian, but whether they were or not, that’s a basic truth we all sometimes need to get hold of. Is it a truth for you today?

 

Second, that truth doesn’t justify self-pity.

 

We need to notice that the psalmist, however wretched he feels, hasn’t given up on God; indeed, he tells us that “my soul thirsts for God, for the living God”. Job-like, he dares to question God; but he makes no secret of the fact that he feels abandoned by him. Downcast he may be, but he’s obviously making a brave attempt to “hang on in there”, as we say. And the psalm ends on an optimistic note: “Put your hope in God”, he says to himself, “for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God”. He is keeping self-pity at bay.

 

My wife has recently been reading through Lamentations – a book that doesn’t exactly promise a bundle of laughs. She was struck by the final verses, where the writer questions God: “Why do you always forget us…” That struck us as possibly crossing the line into self-pity - it’s the word “always” that does it, isn’t it? Do you remember, when you were a child, pouting and sulking and demanding to know “Why is it always me that gets told off?”

 

I’m probably doing the writer of Lamentations an injustice. Who am I to say? But perhaps it can serve to remind us that while doubt and questioning are not necessarily sins, self-pity – the “It’s not fair!” reaction, the “Poor me!” reaction – is, and we should struggle not to  give into it.

 

Faith can be hard, as the Bible demonstrates from beginning to end; but God is a demanding as well as a loving God, and he always looks for faith that refuses to die (and delights when he finds it – see Matthew 8:10).

 

There is of course a lot more that might be said; perhaps we’ll come back to it next time. But I’m sure the best final word is gloriously simple: Let’s always remember, God has sent to this world a Saviour who cried out in agony on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That, of course, is far more than a mere “mood”.

 

But, nonetheless, there is our God. Take comfort from that!.

 

Father, please help me to remember Jesus on the cross – and then raised on the third day – at all times, especially when my mood is low and heavy and I feel like the psalmist. Amen.