Psalm 27/January 27

Egy dolgot kérek az Úrtol,
azért esedezem:
hogy az Úr házában lakhassam,
egész élétemben;
lathassam milyen josagos az Úr
és gyönyörködhessem templomában.

(Psalm 27:4 - in Hungarian/Magyar nyelv)

One thing I ask of the LORD
This is what I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
To gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
And to seek Him in His temple.

Since getting back to Lithuania after Christmas, God has been blessing me with the time every morning to be with Him, to pray, and to eat from His word. Yesterday, my reading took me back to this verse in Psalm 27 - a verse that has been a touchstone for me in recent years. According to my grandmother's book about her life, it's also the verse that she had taped on a card over her Howard City, MI kitchen sink during the years she and my grandfather minstered there. It's also the one verse I still remember in Hungarian, one I memorized 4 years ago.

Boil down all the teaching and learning and doing that characterizes discipleship, and for me, it comes down to this: ONE thing I ask of God and seek unendingly - to dwell with Him, to BE with Him, and to let His beauty be the image that corrects my own small vision.

There is a lot of ugliness in this world. In THIS world, this Klaipeda world. Yesterday, my morning began by being run into by a drunk man stumbling past me in the grocery store, stealing beer by tucking it under his coat. Coming out of a resturant with friends at 11 p.m., two agressive drunk young men yelled angrily in Russian about us foreigners; they stopped and hassled our group before we were able to sneak away. Then, sometime around 4 a.m. this morning, I woke up alone in my apartment to the angry sound of the main building door clanging, voices yelling, and feet stamping up and down the stairs, car doors slamming and voices raised in argument.

Vieno teprašau iš VIEŠPATIES,
tik vieno tenoriu -
gyventi VIEŠPATIES Namuose
per visas savo gyvenimo dienas,
gėrėtis VIEŠPATIES žavumu
ir lankyti jojo Šventyklą.

(Psalm 27:4 - Lithuanian/Lietuviu kalbos)

If my eyes are attuned only to the things I can physically see, there is a lot of reason to be hopeless. A lot of reason to give up and despair.

Choosing instead to gaze upon the LORD's beauty does not mean a passive acceptance of evil, does not mean my eyes will not see the ugliness and sin in front of me. But it does mean that I am able to look at the world and see the beauty beneath the fallenness, the beauty of God that this world was meant, once upon a time, to display. I may not see or experience His beauty now, but there is a promise that if I seek Him, I will one day see His goodness, as the last verses of the Psalm say:

I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
Be strong and take heart
And wait for the Lord -