¹ To you, O Lord, I call;
      my rock, be not deaf to me,
lest, if you be silent to me,
      I become like those who go down to the pit.

For a week now my sinuses have been in revolt (not an uncommon thing), they’re taking my teeth into their band of revolutionaries, and it’s staying under 20^oF outside. A sign, perhaps, of advanced cabin fever in persons of my age is reversion to earlier ways of thinking, such as that of jr. high years, when clean humor occasionally rose slightly above punning to over-literalization. At any rate, first thoughts on reading Psalm 28:1 were talking to a pet rock (if you don’t know, ask someone older) and going to a saloon named The Pit or at least dressing as if I were (hat and boots, or white leisure suit?).
     But the Rock is God and the pit is death, so I rein in those other thoughts like I did with some rambunctious Sunday School boys who are now about 57 years old.
     Junior High is, for many of us, like peering over the ridge surrounding the home valley and seeing the big world beyond as the scene for all sorts of future possibilities. We look and are excited, but it is still good to touch the home base before nightfall. Even if I got in trouble for how late I was, they still let me in and fed me. God, the Rock, comes to look like that base, the safe place where, even if I’m in trouble, I can’t be tagged out.
     So when the Rock seems absent or unresponsive, is the sense of panic greater or less to the degree that I have been relying on him? My guess is that it’s usually the other way around, that when God seems deaf or distant, it’s because I have been brought face-to-face with a dependence on him that I have not been keeping in mind. A glimpse at the pit can do it. That need not be a brush with death itself but might perhaps be one of seeing myself “become like those” whose death is ignorance of God. If I live where zombies walk, it’s not fun but creepy to discover myself walking like one of them.
     Which may be why a person praying this psalm seeks to differentiate himself or herself from some other people:

³ Do not drag me off with the wicked,
     with the workers of evil,
who speak peace with their neighbors
      while evil is in their hearts.
⁴ Give to them according to their work
      and according to the evil of their deeds;
give to them according to the work of their hands;
     render them their due reward.

“My God, my Rock, don’t confuse me with those people who walk blindly into the pit!” Or better yet, “Don’t let me confuse myself with them!”

⁵ Because they do not regard the works of the Lord
      or the work of his hands,
he will tear them down and build them up no more.

     It is after the praying person has seen that vision of judgment and responded by separating from evil that he or she is able to rejoice:

⁶ Blessed be the Lord!
      For he has heard the voice of my pleas for mercy.
⁷ The Lord is my strength and my shield;
      in him my heart trusts, and I am helped;
my heart exults,
      and with my song I give thanks to him.

• Psalm 28 is quoted here from the English Standard Version (2011).
• These posts on the Psalms are in aid of the reading of the Psalms—one a day through the first five months of 2022—by members, attenders, friends, et al. of Together Church, Wyoming, MI.
• No, I don’t believe in zombies.