Psalm 27:1, 4–9

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.

For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock.

Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me!

“Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!” Your face, Lord, do I seek.

Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation! (NRSV)

Trust. The essence of this psalm is trust. I don’t know about you, but the link between feeling vulnerable and trust is clear. A commentator on this psalm says it well: “Trust is active and real precisely when one is aware of one’s vulnerability, of one’s ultimate helplessness before the treats of life.”

There are many of us for whom trust is a keen issue. We may have been hurt or abandoned by someone we thought we trusted fully. We may have experienced trauma or pain where we wondered if we would survive. We may have even broken trust with ourselves, doing or saying something that was out of character for the person we thought we were.

We do years of therapy; we examine the shaken or broken trust; we try and try to redo or reconcile past action in order to trust again. Most of this effort is taken up by the assumption that we are on our own to mend the torn fabric, to find our way to peace, to do the work of reconciliation. But in a close read of this beloved psalm, these efforts only take us to the threshold of trust. Because at the threshold we meet our light and salvation—God. Think of that word: salvation. It is the salve, the remedy, the reliance on God whose love and light shine on us and is our trust.

I truly believe that leaning on God and trusting that God’s everlasting arms never fail us is the deepest and most powerful gift we can be given. And it not only comes as a vague feeling that arises from all of the effort to find trust again, but it comes as a face—the very face of God—revealed in Jesus. Do you see it? Trust it is there, yes!