“Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble: mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly. For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.”

(Psalms 31: 9-10)

The psalmist’s complaints are no different from ours. We may find ourselves preoccupied with worry, with a sense of grief over our lives and our mistakes and losses. We feel like we are in trouble, in a spot we can’t get out of, stuck forever in the mesmerized sense that we can’t escape from the pain, the fear, and it is making us sick and sorrowful. We just may have lost hope.

But we know, as the psalmist did, that there is a recourse. There is a saving answer. There is a place where hope lives and where peace is the atmosphere. It is the encompassing wings of God’s mercy–those wings of Love that both shelter us and take us aloft and out of doubt and the prison of material sense analysis of things. God’s Love is bigger than our attachment to our troubles. God’s voice of Truth can break that unnecessary bondage and open the doors of our life to the good that is at hand.

Everyone sighs and worries and cries. All of us at times feel lost and without a way home. But just as the psalmist knew, these are times for grace. These are the very times that we can call on God for our answer and our salvation. We can’t do it alone and we don’t need to. When we can’t see past our own illusions, we need the light of Love to show us the door out, to wake us to the fact that we are, in fact, safe, happy, worthy, and free.

Laura Moliter, CS

2011 Emergence International Keynote Speaker