Out of the Depths

Psalm 130 never reports that the depths ended. It ends in waiting, and calls that waiting hope. The difference between that and anxiety is the whole psalm.

Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD. The word is used for deep water, the kind you do not stand up in. This is drowning language, and the psalm opens in it without any preamble.

Then a question that does not seem designed to help. If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, who could stand?

It is rhetorical, and the answer is nobody. Not the psalmist, not his enemies, not the reader. The bottom of the psalm is not the circumstance. It is that.

And then, immediately: But with you there is forgiveness. No argument for it, no mechanism, no conditions attached. It is simply set down next to the previous line as the other true thing.

The middle of the psalm is where it settles, and it settles on a word we tend to treat as a failure state. I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the LORD more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.

He says it twice, which is how you know it is the line that matters.

Consider what a watchman is actually doing. He is on a wall in the dark, and morning is the thing he wants. He cannot hasten it. Nothing he does affects when the light arrives. And it does not once occur to him that it might not.

That is a very particular kind of waiting, and it is worth measuring our own against it. Most of our waiting falls into one of two other categories. There is the numb kind, where we have quietly stopped expecting the thing and are only enduring the interval. And there is the frantic kind, where we check and refresh and rehearse, as though attention were a form of influence.

The watchman is neither. He is not passive, because he is awake and on the wall and that is the job. He is not anxious, because the morning is not in question.

Notice too what the psalm does not do. It never announces that the depths drained. There is no verse where the water goes down. The situation at the end of Psalm 130 is, as far as we can tell, the situation at the beginning. What changed is that the waiting acquired a direction, and the psalm is willing to call that hope.

Something to do with this. Name one thing you are waiting on. Then ask which of the three kinds of waiting it currently is: numb, frantic, or on the wall. The answer is usually immediate, and usually not the one we would have claimed.