Written by Jonathan Melton
Psalm 103:1 (NRSV) Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.
The man beside me had become exasperated in his attempts to persuade his friend on the end of the phone. “I give up!” he screamed. “I’ve done all I can.” He slammed the phone shut and panted his exhaustion.
As I processed this stranger’s conversation, I felt compassion for him. He clearly wanted to give his friend a gift. What escaped the man, however, was that the form of his message betrayed the sweetness of its content. More simply, he had stopped living his own faith in an attempt to give faith to another.
“Bless the LORD, O my soul…” The psalmist’s gentle self-prodding reminds us that we are continually living lives of faith. We live them alongside each other, in relationship to each other, sometimes carrying each other, but we never live our lives of faith alone. And when we can find those spaces where our souls truly offer blessings and prayers of thanks for all that we have been given, everything inside of us seems to be saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
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