Daily Devotional • September 6
Psalm 30
I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up
and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
3 O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.
4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones,
and give thanks to his holy name.
5 For his anger is but for a moment;
his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
6 As for me, I said in my prosperity,
“I shall never be moved.”
7 By your favor, O Lord,
you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face;
I was dismayed.
8 To you, O Lord, I cried,
and to the Lord I made supplication:
9 “What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
10 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
O Lord, be my helper!”
11 You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
12 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.
Meditation
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5b)
Many have observed this phenomenon: the difficulty you carried to bed often seems more manageable by morning. Hormone levels (cortisol and melatonin) can determine your readiness to sleep, your feelings of anxiety, and prime you to be alert and awake.
REM sleep cleanses the brain—a kind of nightly reset crucial for emotional and cognitive restoration. The amygdala, the brain’s emotional response center, relies on sleep (and darkness) for regulation and renewal. Likewise there’s simply the hope of a new day that the sunrise provides, a release from the perils of nighttime rumination.
While these biological rhythms offer insight into our emotional recovery, they are ultimately limited. The Psalmist invites us into a hope that transcends biology—a divine promise rooted not in chemistry, but in covenant.
He is not dismissive of your grief and trial. He does not suggest that weeping will come and go like clouds giving way to blue sky. Also, he will not provide a method by which you might negotiate trials or deal with your grief. Rather, it’s the time frame that is important to him. In verse four, the Psalmist declares, “For God’s anger is but for a moment, yet his favor is for a lifetime.”
Pulling back from the bedroom to the house to the neighborhood to the town to the country, quickly you see, that nighttime weeping and morning joy cannot simply be about processing emotional distress in the evening. Nighttime despair may last an entire season of your life—days, weeks, months, God forbid, years. It may involve the life of your household or your extended family or whole church or tribe.
And yet the promise remains: it will not last forever. The trial and despair of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion would end in his death, his harrowing of Hell … and his resurrection. There is no spiritual formula for self-improvement that allows you to bypass the valley of the shadow of death—only the promise that it will not last forever.
You have turned my mourning into dancing:
You have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness. (Psalm 30:11)
The Very Rev. Timothy Kimbrough is the director of the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies and the Jack and Barbara Bovender Professor of the Practice of Anglican Studies at Duke Divinity School. He was previously dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, Tennessee.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Auburn, California
The Diocese of Okigwe South – The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)
The Very Rev. Timothy E. Kimbrough, dean and rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, is a seven-time deputy to General Convention. This year he will serve as vice chair of the convention’s Constitution Committee.
