For You Are With Me

Psalm 23

I was on-call at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and was called down to the oncology unit on the first floor. 

When I got to the patient’s room, I noticed that someone was inside with her already. 

It was one of her nurses and the nurse was trying to reassure her, but the patient was inconsolable.

When the nurse came out from the room, I asked if it was alright that I visit with her.

And she gave me a look as though to say “Enter at your own risk.”

The woman, who I will call Dolores, was clearly in her final days, her breathing was very taxed and she had the distressed and worn out look of someone who had been fighting for way too long.

On top of this, she was feeling extremely lonely and afraid

I’m sure some of you have known that feeling of being alone in a crowded place like a hospital.

She was feeling that isolation and also a gnawing fear.

A fear that her husband would not be with her when she died. 

The nurse had been asked to call her husband to ask him to come. 

But they had been unable to get ahold of him.

And so Dolores was beside herself.

Perhaps it was that I was a new face, a stranger, or something else

But she welcomed me into the room and seemed to calm a bit as I introduced myself as a chaplain.

She asked if I would read her some Psalms. 

I looked around the room and could not find a Bible

so I went out and asked for a Bible and eventually one was found. 

I read a few psalms that I knew and had found comforting, including the 23^rd Psalm. 

She thanked me but then her face changed to a more perplexed and thoughtful expression.

And she began to whisper.

She began to whisper her doubts and questions and anger at God and at the unfairness of life. 

She seemed like she was in a whirlpool of anxiety

and was reaching out to hold on to some connection to land or stability. 

I shared with her that I also struggle with these questions too. 

But that I do believe that a God who loves is behind all of this.

If I had known this hymn at the time, I might have shared it with her:

“Within the maddening maze of things,

When tossed by storm and flood,

To one fixed trust my spirit clings;

I know that God is good!”

When I left the room after forty minutes or so, the storm in her seemed to have passed.

She seemed to feel safer, calmer, more peaceful.

The nurse came in and said that they had reached her husband and that he was on his way.

My experience with Dolores sticks with me.

Dolores was dying from cancer.  But that was not the urgent concern.

More than the fact that she was dying, was the fact that she felt alone.

I think the power of the 23^rd Psalm and of many of the Psalms.

Is that they speak to us out of the Psalmist’s own fears and uncertainties,

Out of the Psalmist’s own loneliness and anxiety.

We have to remember and imagine that there is a person behind the text.

That there’s a struggle behind these prayers.

That every Psalm has a Psalmist. 

And the words are coming from a personal experience of life and God.

The Lord is my shepherd, I’m not alone.

Why does this need to be said, except that the Psalmist,

like all of us, finds again and again that feeling of being left alone in an unfair world.

It is the struggle of faith that makes it possible to say again,

The God who made me is with me

in everything that life brings my way.

I shall not want.

Because the truth is, I will want.  I do want, I am again and again in a place of want.

And so again and again I will need to come to these verses

because though in my clearest moments I believe them,

I find myself in a place of feeling the opposite.

Feeling that the Lord is nowhere to be found. 

And though I read the Psalm to Dolores,

and I think that it was helpful for her to hear the word.

It wasn’t until she was able to speak freely, to talk openly about her fears and doubts,

Her anger and sadness at life’s maddening maze.

It wasn’t until she was able to be honest and in a way, voice her own Psalm,

That she was able find her way back.

To find God again on the other side of her fears.

Or maybe we should say, to be found again.

We need Psalms to remind us and wake us up again to the truth that we’re not alone.

That the uncertainties of past and present and future as uncertain as they are

are held in the loving arms of God.

We need Psalms, but we also need one another.

I don’t think it would have been as helpful if I gave Dolores the Bible and pointed to where the Psalms were and left the room.

It was in our reading together that she was able to share more freely her fears and her doubts.

And explore what Psalm 23 faith means in the darkest valley of her last days in a hospital room.

We need one another – this is how God our shepherd cares for us.

God cares for us, through us.

God leads us, by us,

God restores us, with us.

We are in this together.

And as we worship together, share joys and concerns together,

Visit one another, listen and laugh and cry with one another,

We make real the truth that God is our shepherd.

Because the one named in the Psalm is the same one who indwells each one of us.

And it is through our being present to God and to one another,

That we are reminded not just in our thoughts,

But in our hearts.

That we are not alone. 

That God will see us through,

That love is more real than fear.

Maybe you’re wondering what to do for a friend who is going through a hard time.

Maybe you’re the friend who is going through the hard time and you are wondering where there might be solid ground in the midst of the storm.

Fear is an overwhelming and all-consuming mood.

but it is not the final truth of things.

When I am feeling most afraid or anxious or worried,

What really helps me is not to think of a few of my favorite things,

although I do enjoy that song.

What really helps is rather to remember the times

when I have experienced love from God -- often through another person.

What helps me is to think of those times

when I have felt fulfilled and connected and accepted,

When I have felt safe again, like a sheep remembering again the presence of the shepherd.

Those are the moments of grace, of feeling most fully alive.

To remember the experience of grace but also

To switch the logic of suspicion

in my mind which wants to say,

“that experience of fullness or peace, forgiveness or grace –

that’s really the exception not the norm, that’s not the real truth about me, about God, about life.”

To switch the logic of suspicion to the logic of faith, the logic of Psalm 23 when it says,

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me.”

The truth behind the fear, is the one of God’s abiding presence,

God’s steadfast love.

And whether it’s by myself or oftentimes in conversation with a good friend,

I am reminded of those times, of that experience of God’s presence,

as if awakening from a bad dream,

And it helps me see beyond the storm, beyond the immediate,

To the more abiding truth that God will take care of us.

And will be with us to the end.

The most common image in early Christian art is the Good Shepherd.

A painting on the wall of the underground caverns where early Christians worshipped

That showed a young shepherd with a lamb over his shoulder.

Who had left the 99 just to find the one that had wandered off.

And bring it back to safety.

May we keep that picture ever before the eyes of heart.

And may God’s grace open our hearts to believe.

That the LORD is my shepherd,

I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters;

he restores my soul.

Amen.