Hearing Her Cry
I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.
Psalm 40:1
The Hebrew words for waited and patiently in this verse is the same word qavah, (kaw-vaw')
It means to look, patiently, tarry, wait (for, on, upon). As commentators have noted, it means as I waited, I waited. The word for heard in Hebrew shama`, (shaw-mah') . It means to hear intelligently (often with implication of attention, obedience, etc).
Last Saturday, Valentines Day (er, Valentine's Night), Lina my wife--as I am married, it is good thing that it was my wife--visited a new restaurant in Lancaster city called Gusto's. Sounds like something Schiltz-like. This is a reference from back in the day. Google it if you must.
It was a great time...cold and wet outside, warm and lively inside. About the only redeeming quality of being cold and wet is getting warm and dry.
Reminds me of the time when I watched the Glen Mills football team get shellacked 49-0 by Malvern Prep many years ago when I was a teacher/counselor there....three hours and some change of sitting in 36 degree rainy weather. A cold, hard rain for hours. Misery. When the game was mercifully over, the boys ran for the bus. Not a good thing to happen as they all were adjudicated delinquents...running to the bus could mean that they would possibly keep running past the bus.
A norm of the school was there was no running either on campus or off because of the strong relationship between running and truancy. SO, I barked for the kids to stop running and to walk; they blew me off. Fortunately, they all ran to and not by the bus--probably because they were so damn cold that the idea of being a freezing fugitive in the woods of Malvern Prep was not exactly enticing. Running typically meant that I had to get ready to do a linebacker tackling move. I let them slide.
I spent that night from 6:00 PM to past midnight at The Rat (a since closed down not-so-fine dining, but, certainly copious-drinking establishment for West Chester University's finest student scholars) warming my bones, drinking beers, and sucking energy from others like the Matrix.
Yet, I regress.
Well, after our dinner at Gusto's, Lina and I departed. The last words I remember her saying was something about getting the umbrellas. Soon thereafter, Lina tripped off the restaurant's outside stair and went face-first into the sidewalk and let out a cry. It was a mighty fall. I was shocked. Generally, pratfalls, collisions, banging head off of hard things, and falling, are my exclusive domain. My first reaction was an alarmed "Baby, are you O.K.?" I have heard these words over and over with the same intonation all week as Lina has retold the story. The anatomy of the fall was that her heels got caught on the edge of the stair and both soles of heels pulled off like toenails--leaving them on the stairs. It looked like she had been raptured, minus her heels. She got banged up pretty good but was essentially OK after ice packs on the knees. Her pants...history.
It got me thinking...what if she was alone and had fallen and no one heard her cry? That got me thinking some more. What if God did not exist? We'd cry to an empty universe, the echo of our cry dissipating into an existential nothingness. Francis Schaeffer wrote a book called 'The God Who is There." He writes, "Christianity does not begin with 'accept" Christ as Savior.' Christianity begins with "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Schaeffer added elsewhere to The God Who is There "and He is Not Silent."
Might I be presumptuous enough to add, AND HE HEARS OUR CRIES?
Psalm 40:1
The Hebrew words for waited and patiently in this verse is the same word qavah, (kaw-vaw')
It means to look, patiently, tarry, wait (for, on, upon). As commentators have noted, it means as I waited, I waited. The word for heard in Hebrew shama`, (shaw-mah') . It means to hear intelligently (often with implication of attention, obedience, etc).
Last Saturday, Valentines Day (er, Valentine's Night), Lina my wife--as I am married, it is good thing that it was my wife--visited a new restaurant in Lancaster city called Gusto's. Sounds like something Schiltz-like. This is a reference from back in the day. Google it if you must.
It was a great time...cold and wet outside, warm and lively inside. About the only redeeming quality of being cold and wet is getting warm and dry.
Reminds me of the time when I watched the Glen Mills football team get shellacked 49-0 by Malvern Prep many years ago when I was a teacher/counselor there....three hours and some change of sitting in 36 degree rainy weather. A cold, hard rain for hours. Misery. When the game was mercifully over, the boys ran for the bus. Not a good thing to happen as they all were adjudicated delinquents...running to the bus could mean that they would possibly keep running past the bus.
A norm of the school was there was no running either on campus or off because of the strong relationship between running and truancy. SO, I barked for the kids to stop running and to walk; they blew me off. Fortunately, they all ran to and not by the bus--probably because they were so damn cold that the idea of being a freezing fugitive in the woods of Malvern Prep was not exactly enticing. Running typically meant that I had to get ready to do a linebacker tackling move. I let them slide.
I spent that night from 6:00 PM to past midnight at The Rat (a since closed down not-so-fine dining, but, certainly copious-drinking establishment for West Chester University's finest student scholars) warming my bones, drinking beers, and sucking energy from others like the Matrix.
Yet, I regress.
Well, after our dinner at Gusto's, Lina and I departed. The last words I remember her saying was something about getting the umbrellas. Soon thereafter, Lina tripped off the restaurant's outside stair and went face-first into the sidewalk and let out a cry. It was a mighty fall. I was shocked. Generally, pratfalls, collisions, banging head off of hard things, and falling, are my exclusive domain. My first reaction was an alarmed "Baby, are you O.K.?" I have heard these words over and over with the same intonation all week as Lina has retold the story. The anatomy of the fall was that her heels got caught on the edge of the stair and both soles of heels pulled off like toenails--leaving them on the stairs. It looked like she had been raptured, minus her heels. She got banged up pretty good but was essentially OK after ice packs on the knees. Her pants...history.
It got me thinking...what if she was alone and had fallen and no one heard her cry? That got me thinking some more. What if God did not exist? We'd cry to an empty universe, the echo of our cry dissipating into an existential nothingness. Francis Schaeffer wrote a book called 'The God Who is There." He writes, "Christianity does not begin with 'accept" Christ as Savior.' Christianity begins with "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Schaeffer added elsewhere to The God Who is There "and He is Not Silent."
Might I be presumptuous enough to add, AND HE HEARS OUR CRIES?
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