Psalm 84:1-2

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts!
My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

This is from the ESV.
I pray that it is true of my heart.
Sometimes God has to make things on earth a little bleaker than we'd like them, in order to get us to look up and long for what He has in store for us in heaven.

Psalm 82:3-5

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken."
(ESV)

Dear Lord, help me to understand what this means. Sometimes poverty is the result of wickedness. Sometimes the sins of the fathers affect many generations that follow (Exodus 34:7). Lord, how do we figure out what justice is? Do we simply give love and mercy, and leave the justice to you? Is it OK to give money to someone I am pretty sure will spend it on drugs or alcohol? Who are the wicked? Is there a difference between a wicked poor person and a regular poor person? Is there no such thing as a wicked poor person?

I am very confused. But it makes me think of Micah 6:8...

"He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
(ESV)

Psalm 80:19

"Restore us, O LORD God of hosts! Let your face shine, that we may be saved!" (ESV)

"Restore us, LORD God Almighty; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved." (NIV)

"Turn us again, O LORD God of hosts, cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved." (KJV)

I actually like the KJV here: Turn us again.

Please, God, turn our hearts back to you. Why are we so prone to wander? Please fix our direction and shine your face on us, your loving, powerful, almighty face. It is only through your Spirit and your power that we can ever be saved. Although Jesus took the miraculous steps needed to save us, although He gave his life to redeem ours by suffering, dying and rising again, we cannot even begin to comprehend or accept the truth about Jesus until your face shines understanding and love for you into our hearts. Teach us to depend on you, to look to you, to follow you. Teach us to love you.

A New Focus

Today I read some stuff from my old blog, the really old one I did through a teenie-bopper web journal before I started these two. I don't think that old blog exists anymore, and if it does, I have no idea where to find it, but I had been laboriously copying and pasting each entry into Word so I could keep it for posterity, and today I pulled up that old Word document and read some of it.

In the old days, I went through a blogging spell where I did "VOTD" which stood for Verse of the Day. Sometimes I wrote about the verse of the day, and sometimes I simply quoted it.

I am going to try to start doing that again, here.

I hope I can keep up with it.

We shall see what happens.