What Is the Word of God Saying to You?

A Reflection on Psalm 18:17-20

I don’t often crack open my Bible to study God’s Word, though I wish I did. I take my “Give Us This Day” booklet of Mass readings to church with me, and when something poignant strikes me, I circle or underline it. I may even rip out the page and use it for a bookmark, reading it multiple times so it sticks with me.

The Mass was my sole means for gaining exposure to Scripture: a reading from the Old Testament, a psalm, a NT Letter, and the Gospel. I have great respect for the intertexuality of these writings. St. Augustine saw in the testaments that the new is concealed in the old and the old is revealed in the new. Just last weekend in Mass, we read the OT story from 2 Kings 4:42-44 about Elisha feeding a hundred people with twenty barely loaves. Paired with that reading was Psalm 145:10-11: “The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.” And the Gospel reading from John 6, the beginning of the Bread of Life discourse, which begins with the story of feeding the 5000 with five loaves and two fish. Reading the New Testament in light of the Old offers another layer of meaning and a way to see the same point made in a different context.

Lately, I’ve felt compelled to spend more time in Scripture in my prayer time. As a writer and book editor, words are my jam, so I decided to apply my curiosity of words to the biblical text. This amateur exegesis helped me to hear in new ways the personal message God has for me.

To prayerfully engage with the words, I had to break my habit of approaching the material like I would with any other book. That is, start at the beginning and read through to completion while analyzing the overall plot, characters, and theme. But the Bible isn’t just any book. I would need to adjust my methodology.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes our veneration of the Holy Scripture this way:

In order to reveal himself to men, in the condescension of his goodness God speaks to them in human words: Indeed the words of God, expressed in the words of men, are in every way like human language, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the flesh of human weakness, became like men. Through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely. For this reason, the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God’s Word and Christ’s Body (CCC 101-103, emphasis mine).

The Mass is divided into the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The table at the altar is set to present to us both God’s Word and Christ’s Body.

I’d like to share with you a recent prayer experience I had with Scripture in hopes that you’ll feel inspired to sit down with your Bible, a pencil, and access to resources recommended to me from my theology professors at Franciscan such as https://biblehub.com/ and https://www.blueletterbible.org/.

The verse I selected to pray with was Psalm 18:17-20, using the NABRE translation:

¹⁷ He reached down from on high and seized me;
drew me out of the deep waters.
¹⁸ He rescued me from my mighty enemy,
from foes too powerful for me.
¹⁹ They attacked me on my day of distress,
but the Lord was my support.
²⁰ He set me free in the open;
he rescued me because he loves me.

I wrote out the verses and mapped them using a Bible verse-mapping journal (any journal will work, but I chose to purchase one from TheJamesMethod.com).

I underlined sections of the text that I wanted to dig into.

• “He reached down from on high and seized me;”

Comparing a few different translations, I noticed that instead of “reached” others used the word “delivered.” I looked up the word “delivered” on the handy-dandy blueletterbible.com website and saw, from Hebrew, the word could mean “prepared” “drew out” “beget” “bore” and “brought forth.”

I decided to write my own translation of this phrase: He bore me from on high.

• “drew me out of the deep waters”

I knew from studying literature that water typically represents chaos. The messaging from the world along with pressure to fulfill all the competing responsibilities on my time and money, create confusion in my life. But from this deep chaos, He drew me.

I discovered “drew” also translates to “delivered” (I see a pattern here!) or “redeemed” or “ransomed.”

He ransomed me from the chaos.

• “He rescued me from my mighty enemy, from foes too powerful for me.”

In my prayer, I asked the Lord, Who is my enemy? I don’t always know the answer to this question with certainty. Sometimes I fight the wrong opponent. I prayed that He help me know who to do battle against and who to ignore. I asked the Lord for the wisdom to know when to drop the sword and look beyond my enemy’s hurtful words to see the hurting child who longs desperately to rest in Him.

My enemies are stronger. If I fight this alone, I will lose. But God reaches into the water, pulls me up, and set me down where I’ll be safe.

• “They attacked me on my day of distress, but the Lord was my support.”

My enemies attack me when I’m low and at my most vulnerable. This is Satan’s strategy. I get distracted and overwhelmed. When I focus on the horizon, my shadow hijacks me. And my shadow comes well-prepared for battle. Meanwhile, all I hold is a dirty dishrag. While I am focusing elsewhere, demons try to overtake me. But then St. Michael arrives, sword and shield in hand, and strikes them down with one mighty blow.

When I am low, I am susceptible to the devil’s antics. But I can trust the angels are doing battle on my behalf.

• “He set me free in the open,”

I took a trip to the desert in the middle of COVID. I needed space to breathe and the New Mexican desert was the remedy. Like Georgia O’Keefe, Belden Lane, Edward Abbey, and so many other “desert rats,” I am drawn to “the open.” When God set down the psalmist, He set him “in the open.” The “open” also translates to “in a broad place” or “in a high, spacious place.”

The desert represents the wilderness in Scripture but I always found the desert the ideal place to get solitude with God in the silence. But based on this passage, what I was calling the “desert” may have been the open; the high, spacious place. The very place God put me and wants me to be.

God called me not to a place of scarcity and harsh elements, but an open place set apart where I can contemplate Him, remain quiet, and listen to the night, the moon, and the stars.

• “He rescued me because he loves me.”

Step 1 in Ignatian Spirituality is to contemplate the love God has for us, personally. A popular reflection verse is Psalm 139:13. I knew God loved me in my mind, but it took years to move from my head to my heart and know His love deep in my spirit. Part of what helped me move into the heart space was raising teenagers. It’s hard to watch our children gain independence and make poor decisions that ultimately hurt them. I learned my limits as a parent, which also happens to be the same limits as a human.

Because I could not control, protect, or save my children, I learned to rely on God in a much more personal way because He can. I offered my kids during the Mass, when the priest held high the host, saying “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” God could do what I could never do…because He loves my children more than I ever could. And His love is not tainted with vestiges of a fallen nature.

Like the sacraments, Scripture finds us where we are. It locates us and breathes life into us. God condescends Himself to use language … words which inevitably have limits … to reach us. He wants us to know He loves us, He’s fighting for us, and to remind us that all we need do is sit still while the battle rages around us. The enemy will not wrest a single scratch on our very susceptible flesh and vulnerable spirits.

Encountering God in my weak moments taught me a lesson I may not have otherwise learned with such exactitude. We offer ourselves to our fellow family members, those of blood-relation and those of Spirit-relation, as an act of love, in response to the call from the One who made us and loves us most. We release ourselves into Him and pray every day to remain in docility, like the Blessed Mother when she gave her Fiat.

Like a mother who swipes the hair off her child’s forehead to plant a single kiss, I pray the Scripture locates you in those broken places where you most need to encounter the kiss of the God who calls you His beloved.