When difficult days arise in our life, we will feel the sting of a world broken by sin…broken by our sin. Those days will hurt and feel quite dark and scary. We will feel like giving up. But hear the psalmist who waited on the Lord. 

The intrusion of hard providences in our life can sometimes feel quite profound. When they come, we may pause and wonder how did my life come to this? Why is this happening to me? Where is God in all this?

It’s an awkward pause to what before was normal…now is not.

How do we move forward? How do we react to days or seasons like this? Does God’s Word help us know what to do next?

The other day I read Psalm 62, finding a strange placement for a ‘Selah’. The inclusion of ‘Selah’ in the psalms is meant for us to pause during the course of our reading and reflect on what God just said. Oftentimes, a ‘Selah’ will follow a truth about God that we can relish and find rest in. Sometimes, these come at points strange and unexpected. 

The first two verses in the sixty-second psalm speak of how God is David’s fortress and salvation, the One he waits on. Then, the next two verses speak of an intrusive hard providence during that season of David’s life – deceitful enemies seemed to be attacking him, desirous of seeing his ruin. David found himself in the middle of a time when, by God’s providence, enemies seemed relentless in their pursuit of his demise. 

Then comes the ‘Selah’. 

Selah? You’re telling me of a time when enemies abounded all around you…of their restless attack against you, and now I’m to pause and consider this? I’m to pause – awkwardly pause – and reflect? Reflect on what? 

Maybe what David is getting at with this strangely placed ‘Selah’ is that life can feel like this sometimes. Maybe some of us put our hope and trust in the Lord some time ago and carried about life in fruitful and relatively easy ways. Then, one day, a calamity falls upon us. A hard providence of God comes our way. In the middle of life, difficulties may arise out of the blue that will challenge that foundation of hope we settled on in the past.

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