Life is Good. Yes it is.

Oh yeah, I forgot the main reason I had an urge to blog today was because I read something nice in my new translation of the Bible that I wanted to share. Before every book (in the Bible), Eugene H. Peterson who is the “author” of the Message (a contemporary rendering of the Bible from the original languages, crafted to present its tone, rhythm, events, and ideas in everyday language) writes up a little sort of blurb and this is what he writes about the psalms that I thought was interesting cause I’ve never really thought about them in this way and also recently I’ve been struggling with praying so this was really refreshing and encouraging.
Here are some extracts:

“The Psalms is a prayer book that gives us a language adequate for responding to the God who speaks to us.”

“The impulse to pray is deep within us, at the very center of our created being, and so practically anything will do to get us started – “Help!” and “Thanks!” are our basic prayers. But honesty and thoroughness don’t come quite as spontaneously”

“Faced with the prospect of conversation with a holy God who speaks worlds into being, it is not surprising that we have trouble. We feel awkward and out of place: “I’m not good enough for this. I’ll wait until I clean up my act and prove that I am a decent person.” (I don’t know about you guys, but I sure can relate to this one!) Or we excuse ourselves on the grounds that our vocabulary is inadequate: “Give me a few months – or years! – to practice prayers that are polished enough for a such a sacred meeting. Then I won’t feel so stuttery and ill at ease.”

“Prayer is elemental, not advanced language… It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God.” (Not that He doesn’t know anyways, but He likes to hear it from us)
“And so in my Pastoral work of teaching people to pray, I started paraphrasing the Psalms into the rhythms and idiom of contemporary English. I wanted to provide men and women access to the immense range and the terrific energies or prayer in the kind of language that is most immediate to them, which also happens to be the language in which these psalm prayers were first expressed and written by David and his successors.

I continue to want to do that, convinced that only as we develop raw honesty and detailed thoroughness in our praying do we become whole, truly human in Jesus Christ, who also prayed the Psalms.”

Try it. Pray a psalm.

Later,