make haste to help me
“Make haste to deliver me…to help me.” Psalm 70:1
What does this mean? The God who knows no time constraints has us pray for his speed, his haste. Doesn’t “haste make waste”? Don’t we already live in an impatient day, when we want what we want when we want it and find it painful to wait for anything? Shouldn’t God want us to be ANTI-haste?
The key for me is in verse 5 of the psalm: “I am poor and needy.” The recognition of my neediness is so necessary to any cry for intervention. It means that I’ve gotten to the end of my own resources. I can go along “handling” almost everything that comes my way…and I’ve had to for most of my life: the death of a baby, the critical illness of another child, rejection, loss. There have been moments of desperation, and my closest friends can tell you that I’ve railed and cried and haven’t always been a rock of resolve. But I rebound fairly quickly. I try to find solutions, believing that things will get better. I’ve rarely felt the URGENCY required by this prayer.
Maybe I haven’t felt the urgency because I’m looking at it as a cry for circumstances to improve. And in that context it is hard to pray for haste when I know that European Jews had to endure Hitler’s "final solution" for a decade, that American indigenous peoples had to wait a century or more for the recompense from the seizure of their lands, that African-Americans have had to wait for hundreds of years and still wait to be seen by some of their fellow citizens as loved and valuable members of their communities, and that Hispanic people who have been productive, tax-paying business owners or students brought to this country by undocumented parents have waited ten to fifteen years to feel secure in pursuing the American Dream. When I see all of that, why would I pray for God to make haste to help ME?! I am not poor and needy.
Or am I? I certainly have lived well. But Jesus says, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternity.” (John 12:25) And Mary says in her Magnificat, “He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.”
How hungry am I for the things that please God? My real poverty is the illusion of self-sufficiency, my inability to see my neediness in the presence of a God who made me and numbered my days for a purpose…a God who sees my failure to live into that purpose because of my own selfishness and desire for luxury, and who knows full well that the more I amass, the more I’m enslaved by it, to the point where it will eventually bury me alive.
And STILL I can ask him to hurry up and help ME?! He tells me to. Dare I?
Yes. Because the help I need in this new year, in every moment and every day, is to die to myself, to my lust for comfort, and to live for him and for the love of my fellowman. THIS I cannot do on my own. THIS I need help with right now. HURRY, Lord, make haste to help me!
Love, Liz
Be watching next week for a big announcement.
