Out of the depths

Psalm 130 begins at the bottom. Out of the depths I have cried to you, says the psalmist, and there is no pretending the depths are anything but deep. This is not a prayer from the shallows; it is a voice calling up from the place where the water has closed overhead. And yet the psalm does not stay there as a record of despair. It turns, partway through, into one of the most quietly fierce images of hope in all of Scripture. My soul waits for the Lord, the psalmist says, more than watchmen wait for the morning. And then, as if once were not enough to bear the weight of it, he says it again: more than watchmen for the morning. Picture the watchman on the wall through the long, cold hours before dawn. He cannot make the sun come up; he has no power over the night. But he is not anxious about whether morning will come, only about how long the waiting will be, because the dawn is fixed and on its way. So he watches. He leans his whole tired weight on a sunrise he cannot yet see. That is the posture of a soul in the depths that has not let go of hope.

There is a difference between merely enduring the dark and waiting in it as a watchman waits, and the difference is hope. Endurance grits its teeth and counts the hours and secretly suspects the morning may never come. The watchman counts the same hours, but he counts them down, because he knows how this ends. The sun is not in doubt. It is only slow. That one certainty changes the whole character of the waiting; it turns dead time into expectant time, despair into longing. If you are crying out of the depths tonight, the psalmist hands you the watchman as your model. You cannot hurry your dawn any more than he can hurry his; the long hours will be as long as they will be. But your night is not endless, however bottomless it feels from inside. The morning is fixed. So wait for the Lord the way the watchman waits, leaning the full weight of your exhaustion on a sunrise you know is coming.