As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. That means I earn commissions from my sponsored links or I make money when readers (you) purchase items through my links. Your purchase allows me to continue working as a stay-at-home dad who moonlights as a farmer and a musician. Needless to say, this post contains affiliate links.
Psalms 42:11 — “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
I’ve been reading and rereading this verse for a few minutes now and .
I stumbled back into faith recently… quietly, without announcement after attending the Thai Boran Woodlane opening.
Yesterday, as I was writing the article for it, I downloaded a Bible app. I guess so I could better understand the prayers that were involved in the dedication.
And this morning, this psalm found me.
Or maybe I found it.
I’m not sure it matters which.
I don’t want to make this about anyone else.
These are just my reflections, my own quiet reckoning with something that’s been sitting heavy on my chest.
But I’ll say this honestly… there are mornings when I wake up and the person I love most in this world feels very far away, even when we’re in the same house.
Even when we’re in the same room.
It doesn’t feel like distance from a lack of love.
It feels like distance from distraction.
From the slow, almost invisible drift that happens when two people stop actively rowing toward each other and start rowing toward everything else instead.
I think about this a lot over coffee.
I think about how easy it is to defend the things pulling us apart and how hard it is to defend the thing holding us together.
I’m not a perfect husband.
I know that.
But I want to be a better one.
I want us to choose each other, deliberately, every day, the way we must have once believed we would.
That’s the disturbance I feel.
I think.
Not just sadness.
But the specific ache of wanting something deeply and feeling helpless about how to get there.
So I’m doing the only thing the verse suggests.
I’m putting my hope somewhere bigger than my own ability to fix this.
I’m trusting that clarity will come… that we will both, eventually, see more reasons to move toward each other than away.
That the things worth protecting will become obvious again.
That the noise will quiet down long enough for us to remember what we built and why it matters.
Why are you downcast, my soul?
Because love is hard and I am human and some days the gap feels wider than I know how to cross.
But I will yet praise him.
Because hope, even small and quiet, is still hope.
And that’s enough to get through the morning.
Now to get my head back in the game and start writing these articles that I need to publish today because they won’t write themselves.
