Psalm 91
My mother used to say that in her estimation the Psalms between 90 and 110 where the heavy hitters of the Bible. To use a golf illustration, they are the drivers, designed to move the ball down the field.
Psalm 91 is certainly no exception, and is again one of the best-known Psalms in the Bible. The portrait of dangers in the day in which this author was writing is so vivid. One of the assuring aspects of the Bible for me is that it was not written in the comfort of some air-conditioned academic library, but rather is the journal of a group of people trying to work out their life under the hot desert sun over a long period of time.
Many things have changed over the years, but the troubles that we face in general terms, and the challenges in terms of our response to external problems haven’t changed all that much – and Psalms like this help us to keep our perspective under fire.
I remember hearing Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, a psychiatrist who did the original research on stages of death, speak at St. Boniface Hospital back in the 1970s, and she quoted verse seven when talking about the seeming unreality of death to each of us when it’s not our own that we face.
If I were to represent this Psalm using film, I think I would use a crane shot, having the camera circle around the speaker, combined with multiple changes in perspective.
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