There’s a crack in everything
LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON
If there’s one theme these essays keep pounding on, it’s to drop all pretense and spill your guts to God.
Feeling overwhelmed, exasperated, enraged?
Find a pillow or a legal pad and let loose a string of naked honesties that God already knows but you need to release to God.
Real repentance begins with getting real. Coming to love our enemies means first recognizing that we hate them. Giving vengeance to God means first owning we want it for ourselves.
“There’s a crack in everything,” Leonard Cohen sings, “that’s how the light gets in.” Honest prayer is a crowbar to pry open the soul’s cracks wide enough for the light to get in.
Honesty also paves the way for true praise. So many Psalms put this on stark display — they show us how to tell it like it is and worship even in the dark.
While emoting to God is usually a hidden practice, its effects spill out of the prayer closet into real life. A person who loves his family well and works for justice in the way of Jesus is a person who has wrestled with God in the secret place. The prophet Micah asks, What does God require of us? To act justly and to love mercy. And becoming a just and loving person only happens as we walk (and talk) humbly and honestly with God.
Brian Morykon
Director of Communications
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
W. David O. Taylor explains how harsh language in the psalms expresses dismay about “things that desecrate God’s good world.”
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Worth a re-watch if you’ve already seen it, here is Bono interviewing Eugene Peterson on his paraphrase of the Psalms for The Message.
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3.
How do we “leave the vengeance to God”? Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains how to pray the imprecatory psalms as sinners ourselves, forgiving our enemies.
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Charles E. Moore points us to the good news in regards to injustice: Jesus empowers us to root it out in ourselves and our communities. “The one who preached repentance is also the one through whom the power of evil and sin is broken.”
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“Again and again we use our words to protect ourselves, to’put others in their place,’” writes Howard Thurman, offering his own prayer to become an instrument of God’s peace.
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6.
What can we do “when praises seem out of touch?” Brian Morykon’s newly released song “Well Within Your Grace” helps me to meditate on God’s goodness even when darkness monopolizes my vision.
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
WORTH QUOTING
“The psalmist is brutally honest about the explosive joy that he’s feeling, the deep sorrow or confusion, and that sets the Psalms apart for me… and I often think, gosh, why isn’t church music more like that?”
– Bono (source)
TO PONDER
Sometimes when we feel overwhelmed by all that is wrong with the world it helps to focus on all that is right. Look out your window or step outside for a bit… What evidence of God’s goodness and order do you see in the world around you?