But Who's Counting?

Seven times a day I praise You

     for Your righteous rules.

                      Psalm 119. 164

Anything we do seven times a day will definitely change us.  If we ate seven donuts a day, if we practiced the piano seven times a day, if we exercised seven hours a day, the repetition and continuity would engrave patterns in our lives, for better or for worse.

But how many times a day do we praise God?  We pray to Him, but do we praise Him?  We certainly don’t come even close to seven times a day.

How different would our lives look if we praised God that much?

How different would we look at life? 

How differently would we pray?

When our oldest daughter was starting high school, we moved to Iowa City.  Our very outgoing girl suddenly knew no one.  And that black hole of relationships really de-railed her emotionally.  I would sneak down to her room in the evenings, just to talk.  She would burst into tears.  What’s the matter, sweetie?   “I don’t know!” she would wail.

“Ok, tomorrow,” I suggested, “look for the joy.  God will reveal it to you in some shape or size.  But you have to look for it.”

That next day, someone she met at church simply said “hi” in the hallway.  That was enough to trigger her pursuit.  One little joy, and then the next day, another rose to the surface.  Day by day, she looked for the joy.  And day by day, she praised God for it.

The praise didn’t change her circumstances, but that daily exercise strengthened her heart and focused all her senses on His Presence. 

Seven times a day praise.  Not despair.  Nor anxious thoughts.  Nor complaining or grumbling.  When we praise seven times a day, there’s no room for those termites of our souls.

Praise pushes back against the darkness, caulks the cracks that worries squeeze through, and bolts the doors to the beasts of our own fearful imaginations.

When Bill and I are hiking in the wilds, we often find cairns to guide our way when the trail is not marked well.  The cairns are simply small stones that previous hikers stack one upon another to reveal the way to go. 

Praise does the same for us.  This is how to approach, navigate and respond to our circumstances.  And in turn, our praise constructs a cairn for others. Praise leaves a trace of His Presence for those who come after us.

How do we turn this hard situation into praise?  How do we rewrite this scene, not into a Pollyanna kind of story, but to reveal an Almighty God narrative?

Praying our praise, verbalizing our praise, and acting on it, allows us the time –or margins—for contemplating His goodness in this very broken world.

In Tish Harrison Warren’s classic book Prayer In The Night, she notes, “One reason we pray is so that the love of God might cease to be a spent and musty idea and instead become our light – the illumination by which we see everything.”  She goes on to recall that “all the categories of suffering on earth are real and horrifying.  But I also remember that they cannot separate us from the love of God.”

Praise holds us on that sacred ground.

God is not just the recipient of praise.  But the reflector of it.  He provides a huge side order of tremendous strength to us through it.

When I first read this verse, I misread the second part.  Instead of reading “for Your righteous rules,” I saw, “for Your righteousness rules.”

His righteousness prevails every moment we praise Him. 

We praise God for who He is, not just what He does.  How he reveals Himself.  How He unfolds His majesty, even in the ordinary.  How He loves us so very much.  His protection, provision and His Presence.

Sometimes He says, “Come sit with Me.”  And sometimes, “Let’s go for a run together.”  He goes behind, He goes before.  His faithfulness is rooted even in the hard stuff.  His forgiveness always embraces us to lift us back up again.

As Rebecca McLaughlin says, “Look up at the night sky and you will see much darkness.  But train a telescope on the blackest patch, and a million galaxies explode into view.”

One joy we didn’t see before, and then, far more than we can imagine, even in the darkness and the hard stuff, the brilliance of His love.

Seven times a day I praise You.

May we lose count.