Like those who dream

Seventy years is long enough to forget that exile ends. A generation born in Babylon had never seen Zion; they knew the songs of home only as their parents' grief, the harps hung on the willows, the question of how to sing the LORD's song in a strange land. And then the impossible word arrives: you may go home. The psalm that remembers it does not reach first for triumph. It reaches for a stranger feeling — we were like those who dream. Not we rejoiced, not we marched out in glory, but we walked around dazed, unsure the ground was real, the way you move through the first minutes of waking when the good news has not yet been believed by the body. The mouth, the psalm says, filled with laughter; the tongue with singing. But underneath the laughter is the disbelief that makes the laughter what it is. The deliverance was too long-prayed and too far gone to trust on first sight. So they pinched themselves and laughed and could only say the plainest true thing there was to say: the LORD has done great things for us. The exile they had stopped expecting to end had ended.

There is a particular danger in a long disorientation, and it is not despair. Despair at least keeps the question alive. The deeper danger is that you quietly stop expecting the turn at all — you make a permanent home in Babylon, decorate the captivity, and call wanting more naive. The returning exiles had every reason to have done exactly that. Seventy years is a lifetime. And the grace of this psalm is that it does not scold them for the dazed disbelief; it honors it. The dreamlike quality is not weak faith. It is the honest response of people for whom the rescue is genuinely too large for the size their hope had shrunk to. So if God brings the reversal you had given up daring to name, you may not feel the clean joy you once imagined. You may feel unsteady, suspicious of your own happiness, half-waiting for it to dissolve. Let it be. Laughter and disbelief can share one mouth. The dream is real this time, and all the moment asks of you is the sentence the exiles found: the LORD has done great things.