“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not your peace at my tears! For I am a sojourner with you, a guest, like all my fathers.“
Psalm 39:12
Sometimes we need to lean back in our chairs, look off into the distance, and think about God, His Word, and His way in the world. We need to zoom out and see the bigger picture. Psalms 39:12 does that for us.
To sojourn means to “live short” to temporarily live in a foreign place. David explains the urgency of his prayer by saying that he recognizes his life is brief; he is but a guest in this world, just like his fathers. And like his fathers, his time will soon pass, so he pleads for God to answer his prayer based on his brief time in this world.
It’s good for us to audit ourselves, to see if we are “living short” in this world, to remember that we are guests in God’s creation. Guests come, and then they go.
Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash