This is the psalm I’ve been waiting for — dreading, even. It’s special, though not my favorite, by any measure. It’s like the day someone close to you died. Or the day an unlucky man was born.
One verse is familiar to those of us who’d rise and shine every weekday to Arthur Smith’s “Top of the Morning” radio show: “This the day the Lord has made; / We will rejoice and be glad in it.”
In my mind’s ear, I hear the old “Guitar Boogie” man singing that verse — well, an older version of it, anyway, and in his Southern drawl. In my mind’s eye, I spy my family at the breakfast table.
From there we’d move to the den where my dad would share “Our Daily Bread” — no, not more toast and jam, more like “Green Eggs and Ham” — our little booklet of daily devotional readings.
Each day’s devotional consisted of a short Bible reading, a brief commentary and a “Thought for the Day.” Until I spent six weeks at Grace Hospital, that’s how every day of my childhood began.
And then, years later, it was my younger brother’s turn — to spend weeks away from home and in the hospital, that is. He wasn’t in traction, though, like I’d been. But his case was much worse.
On the dark morning of his first surgery, I was alone at home. Our mom was with Ken at Baptist Hospital. Our dad was in the car on his way to Winston-Salem. I would go there later in the day.
I don’t remember what I ate for breakfast that morning, if I ate anything at all. But I do remember what I read instead of “Our Daily Bread.” I opened my Bible to the 17th verse of this very psalm:
“I shall not die, but live,” the psalmist says, “[a]nd declare the works of the Lord.” Later I learned that my mom and little brother had picked the same psalm at random that morning, just as I had.
As we’re wont to do, I took it as a sign — as a promise, even. I wanted so badly for my innocent little brother to live and to walk again, and to beat the damned disease that was eating him alive.
But, no. He survived that surgery and two other operations over the next three months. But this athletic boy never walked again, not after the radiation zapped him and the poison sapped him.
Now at 64 — getting older, losing my hair — I look back on that morning in the fall of 1976, and I see that my 17-year-old self was right to read those words with hope. For it was really about me.