Turning to the Lord in our Need

“Turn to the Lord in your need, and you will live” (Ps. 69).  In today’s first reading, Ex 2: 1-15a, we learn of the beginnings of Moses’ life, how he was saved, adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised by her. As an adult Moses sees one of his kinsmen being abused by an Egyptian. Moses intervenes and kills the attacker, thinking no one will see him. The next day he discovers that what he did is, in fact, no secret and he flees for his life.

We may not be fleeing for such serious offenses but we flee nevertheless for less serious ways of bringing distress, hurt and pain into another person’s life. None of us is exempt from doing or saying things that could put us at enmity with another. Sometimes we find ourselves in such a situation because of how an innocent situation is interpreted as “wrong” by the other. As the psalmist says in today’s responsorial psalm, Psalm 69: 3, 14, 30-31, 33-34:

“I am sunk in the abysmal swamp

Where there is no foothold;
I have reached the watery depths;
The flood overwhelms me”

The swamp may be the other person’s anger or one’s own guilt, anger or powerlessness to change what has been done or to elicit understanding from the offended person.  As with the psalmist, we are invited  to recognize our need for God’s help, less we sink into the swamp of our own anger, drown in “the watery depth” of self-pity or be flooded by a desire to retaliate in some way.

“…I pray to you, O Lord,

For the time of your favor, O God!
In your great kindness answer me
with your constant help….
[L]et your saving help, O God, protect me
[from my own sinfulness and selfishness,
my own desire to be right and in control].”

And the psalmist says to me in the same psalm:

“See, you lowly ones [I am one of those lowly ones] and be glad;

You who seek God, may your hearts revive!
For the Lord hears the poor,
And his own who are in bonds he spurns not.”

May you discover this fact today and always as you deal with the conflicts of life.