The Psalm During the Spin Cycle

For the believer whose only unobserved praise happens beside a machine.

You have worked out that the spin cycle gives you eleven minutes, and that's how you've come to measure this part of your week.

It's the one stretch in the house where nobody comes looking. The machine is loud enough that a person in the next room assumes you're busy, and it sits in a corner nobody has a reason to walk into.

So you stand with your back against the worktop and say whatever you can't say anywhere else in that house. Some of it out loud, because the noise covers you.

Eleven minutes, twice a week, with your hands sometimes folded and sometimes not. That's your whole practice, and you know perfectly well that it's your whole practice.

You used to have more. You are not going to get that arrangement back by wishing at a washing machine, and pretending otherwise would waste the eleven minutes you actually hold.

Then somebody calls through about the car keys and you answer. By the time you come back the machine has stopped, the moment has gone, and you feel what you always feel.

Continually describes a direction rather than an unbroken sound. Scripture's psalm was written by a man running for his life, and the Spirit keeps that praise in your mouth while you go and find the keys.

Continual Was Never Uninterrupted

That word continual is where this hurts, and it's worth handling carefully, because your own mind has been using it against you.

You hear continual and picture unbroken. A steady stream, never stopping, no gaps anywhere, which is a standard no living person with a household has ever met and no psalm ever asked for.

Continual in that psalm is about a settled direction rather than an unbroken noise. It's the difference between a river and a hosepipe. A river isn't running fast at every point along it, and somebody standing at a still bend hasn't found the place where the river stopped.

Your eleven minutes are a bend in a river. The call about the keys didn't dam anything.

You aren't required to be uninterrupted, because continual was never a description of a sound. The written Word's psalm as written sets the praise as a settled direction, and the Spirit keeps it running through a question about car keys.

At All Times, Said by a Man on the Run

Here's the verse, and where it comes from matters as much as what it says.

I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.Psalm 34:1 (KJV)

At all times. Continually. Large words, and it would be easy to read them as a standard you are failing by about ninety percent.

Look at the man writing them. This psalm carries a note about David escaping from a king by pretending to be mad, scratching at a gate with spit in his beard, running for his life with nowhere at all to go.

That's the life the sentence was written inside. Not a settled life with hours to spare and a quiet room. A life of interruptions so violent that a question about car keys would have looked like peace.

Those words were first written by a man in flight, and they arrive beside a washing machine without narrowing. At all times was never spoken out of an undisturbed life.

You can say at all times out of an interrupted life, because that's the life it was first said in. Scripture's psalm as written puts those words in the mouth of a man on the run, and the Spirit puts them in yours.

Fierce About the Wrong Thing

Say something plainly, because a real fire in you has been turned in the wrong direction.

You're fierce. That's obvious from how you have held onto eleven minutes twice a week for however long it's been, in a house with no room in it, with nobody knowing it happens.

But the fierceness has found the wrong target. It's been aimed at yourself, at the inadequacy of the arrangement, at the gap between this and what you think it should look like.

Turn it round. Be fierce about the eleven minutes rather than about their smallness. Defend them. Nobody else in that house knows they exist, which means you're the only person who can protect them, and you've been spending your strength attacking them instead.

You can spend your fire defending what you have rather than judging it. The written Word's psalm as written blesses the Lord from inside a hard life, and the Spirit gives the strength to guard eleven minutes rather than despise them.

What the Noise Is Actually For

Consider the machine itself, because you've treated it as scenery and it isn't.

It's loud. That's the whole reason this works. The noise is what lets you say out loud, in a full house, sentences you'd never risk at the kitchen table with people at it.

A great many believers never find a place like that and never say those sentences to anybody. They think them, carefully, in silence, for decades.

You found one by accident in a corner nobody walks into. It cost you nothing, it isn't beautiful, and it does the one job a private room is supposed to do.

That is worth more than it sounds. A believer who can say the true sentence out loud somewhere is in a different condition from one who has never found anywhere. The difference shows up in neither account they would give of themselves.

A corner nobody enters is doing the work a private room was meant to do. It has no window and no chair, and it is the only square yard of that house where nothing is being managed for anybody's benefit.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.