Week 16 Psalm 104
It’s a pretty-interesting and down-to-earth psalm. It talks about all the things that are ‘going on’. The oceans stay in the ocean. Animals drink from streams. Birds nest in trees. Grass grows & animals feed. Olive groves & vineyards & wheat fields grow for food. The moon cycles through the months. Wild animals hunt for food. People put in a days’ work. Days-&-nights alternate metronomically. Ships sail the seas & submarine life swims beneath them. From all external observation life goes on in its normal natural necessitarian self-governing that’s-just-how-things-work kind of way.
But the psalm admits that there’s more to it than meets-the-eye. These all look to you (the Lord) to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. So everything carries-on normally as the Lord supplies everything for everything.
In the regular run of things container-traffic international-conflict birthday-parties court-proceedings cross-country-shipping canola-fields-growing human-trafficking and high-school-graduations are happening as usual. It seems like a big helter-skelter-ish melange – a mix of random-intentionalities and meaningful-ineffectualities. My As-Usual life moves along as usual.
From the inside it’s way easier to just live my life than to try making much sense of it. But the writer says that outside of my As-Usual life I’m surrounded by dependable and reliable and hard-to-spot-and-easy-to-forget sense-making glory-of-the-Lord. The machinery of the Lord quietly humming along making it all work.
Note: quote from 104:27-28 (NIV)