On Day Two of my antique adventure through Warrenton and Round Top, I had been asked by my husband to look for three specific items: (1) a two-ft tall tree stump with parallel ends, (2) an old surveyor’s tripod, and (3) a Plumb Bob.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for and I doubted I’d find all three, but at Round Top, there’s always a slightly-bored man eager to talk tools and help three not quite 60-year-old women; ultimately I had some success, finding one out of three. Items listed, that is, not men. My one wonderful man is quite enough, thank you very much.
And to make sure he knew I was thinking about him during our girls-only weekend (he didn’t understand why he wasn’t invited to hang out with three women who had known each other for over 40 years, and we couldn’t understand why he would want to!), I found him a few more man-toys not on his list.
Made of brass and with a pointy tip, the Plumb Bob was pretty cool.
All it needed was a string to be complete.
When suspended from on high, the Plumb Bob’s weight is what pulls the string straight into a perfect vertical alignment.
Yes, I had to look that up. But while I was doing so, I realized the Plumb Bob was God’s way of showing me my prayer life. I’d been happily thanking God for the easy things in my life -- maybe because that’s all I was praying for -- and now it was time to ask, “How are my prayers lining up to your Kingdom purposes, God?”
And the answer came quite quickly -- Plumb Bob, Psalms-style.
Swinging from the heavens, the psalms weigh heavily with praise and worship and petitions. People shout and scream and whine and gripe and beg. They celebrate and dance and sing. They confess and repent. And through all the cries and commotion and sometimes chaos, they look up and see God.
The psalms “track a path through the vastness of human emotion, its tundras and its jungles, and direct all of it Godward.” Pastor Mark Buchanan writes in Your God is Too Safe. “What do you do with your hatred, bitterness, ecstasy, weariness, heaviness, longings, disappointments, despair, and desires? To whom can you entrust all that?” The psalms “help us to bring all we are – our holy, disheveled, desperate selves – to all of God.”
And they line us up with His perfect will for our lives and for His kingdom.
For me, today’s the day I go back to the discipline of praying a psalm a day. A while back, I’d read one psalm each day and then discuss it with a very good friend. We’d sometimes read from C. H. Spurgeon’s Treasury of David and discuss that, too. More important, however, we'd mediate all day long on that one psalm.
The old-fashioned Plumb Bob, what a treasure.
The even older Psalms, what treasures they hold.
I’m so glad God speaks in the wonder of the everyday! I wonder what he would have said had I found a tree stump!
Blessed is the man whose “delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2 NIV).
“He delights, moreover, to meditate in it, to read it by day, and think upon it by night. He takes a text and carries it with him all day long; and in the night-watches, when sleep forsakes his eyelids, he museth upon the Word of God. In the day of his prosperity, he sings psalms out of the Word of God, and in the night of his affliction, he comforts himself with promises out of the same book” (Spurgeon on Psalm 1:2).
Buchanan, Mark. Your God is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can’t Control. Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 2001. 233.
Spurgeon, Charles H. The Treasury of David: Classic Reflections on the Wisdom of the Psalms. Vol. 1. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. 2.
Becky Bader 