Month: October 2018

Just over 30 years ago I was working for a small publishing company and had poured my ‘heart and soul’ into the relaunch of a magazine. Not only was I an employee of the company, I was also one of three shareholders. Then, without notice, the two other shareholders decided that ‘my’ project should be taken over by another company with which they were associated.

I was devastated. I literally cried, the grief was overwhelming, what could I do?

I think that David must have felt something similar when

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Where is God in all this? Is an inescapable question for people with faith. It was posed in an article in the Guardian in early January 2005 following the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004¹. The responses according to the tsunami, according to the article, included; “Christians stressed God’s presence with the suffering, Hindus reconciled themselves to fate, the Chief Rabbi composed a prayer and the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph.”²

But, whether the question, in our time, is asked about a natural disaster, a car crash, or a mass shooting, it’s not a new one. The writer of Psalm 10 posed the same question when

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Psalm 8 is the first psalm of ‘praise’ in the book of Psalms. We have had laments and two psalms of introduction but the prayer expressed in Psalm 8 is an awestruck ‘WOW’. God is great, just look at all he has made!

In the context of the Ancient Near East, the ‘wow God is creator’ is an important contrast with the attitude of people living around Israel. They

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The vivid start of this psalm expresses the extreme vulnerability David felt and, his sense of ‘there is nowhere else to go!’

David knew what it was like to fight a lion. He tells Saul, in 1 Samuel 17:34-37, he has rescued lambs from both bears and lions while tending his father’s flocks. The ‘ripping and tearing apart’ (Ps7:2) are something that he can visualise very clearly.

Somehow David has escaped his pursuer and seems to be peering out from

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