My soul is weary with sorrow;
Strengthen me according to your word. Psalm 119:28
My comfort in my suffering is this:
Your promise preserves my life. Psalm 119:50
When we are face-to-face with our demise, we are sorrowful for the seeming futility of our best efforts to make the world a better place, sorrowful that we have not yet accomplished the goals we had for our life, sorrowful with regret for roads not taken. Christians then search God’s Word for some consolation that we did not work in vain. The Anonymous author of Psalm 119 was familiar with all this when he wrote verse 28. In our affliction we waver between hope and fatal resignation, but in our darker moments we search for meaning for a life cut short of what we dreamed it would be. Verses like 1 Corinthians 15 :58—"Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” — are cherished for the succor they provide. This was true for the writer of Psalm 119, and for us today.
By the time the author composed verse 50, he and come to know the answer to the plea of verse 28: God’s promise to “preserve” his life. I had read this verse many times before and always interpreted it to mean God would extend my days according to his plan for me. That somehow by being His beloved and faithful child my life would be blessed with increased opportunities to do good, to reach an age where I could go serenely into blissful repose (but not a minute before I was ready!). I now see verse 50 differently. Now I see the promise to “preserve our life” as meaning that the life we lived, under His sovereign control and with a heart filled with His spirit, no matter how short or long, will not have been lived in vain. The good that we did, the students who we tutored into moral and spiritual maturity in our classes, the generous spirit that God implanted and that prompted us into action, the words of comfort we gave to those in need of a tender touch, and all the other good deeds that we instinctively performed as we passed along his blessings to us, these things are preserved by God for the benefits they delivered after we are gone.
I’m writing this in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, when we all stand in awe of the bravery of the healthcare workers who risk their own lives to save others, when the crushing load of Covid19 cases makes it seem as though their work is but a hopeless effort to sweep back a tsunami of terror with a broom. Someone on a news program about the pandemic, musing on the enormity of the problem facing healthcare workers, quoted Jana Stanfield: “I cannot do all the good the world needs. But the world needs all the good I can do.” While it might seem small when it is done, performing a good deed, which God planned for you to do (Ephesians 2:10), can be prospered by God to contribute to the repository of good works in ways that you will learn of only when you get to heaven.
This interpretation of “preserving my life” (i.e., prospering the results of our deeds done in His behalf) would seem to have been on Moses’ mind when he wrote Psalm 90, the oldest Psalm in the Psalter. In verse 10 he reveals his pondering of the significance of a life:
“The length of our days is seventy years—
Or eighty, if we have the strength:
Yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
For they quickly pass, and we fly away.
But he ends the Psalm by asking God to make our work done in His name to matter, to produce fruit that will last:
May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us:
Establish the work of our hands for us—
Yes, establish the work of our hands.
So it is God who “establishes the work of our hands” so that our labor bears fruit. We need not worry whether our work made a difference—He will make sure that it does, no matter its length on this earth. After all, once we accept that our eternal life has already begun, what matters it that the number of days we spent on this side of eternity are few or many? Like Moses and the Anonymous author of Psalm 119, what gives us comfort in our suffering is that our efforts to do good, no matter how humble or puny their effect in our eyes, can continue to “produce a crop 100, 60, or 30 times what was sown”(Matthew 13:8), long after our time on this earth has ended. The beauty that “Anonymous” was the author of Psalm 119 is now revealed: we can all claim these words are our own expression of finding comfort in our suffering:
My comfort in my suffering is this:
Your promise preserves my life. Psalm 119:50
