Lifted
This past Sunday, Father’s Day, I was reflecting again on how different my life has been compared with my father’s. At age seventeen I was signing up for freshman classes at the local community college. I started at Pima Community College, then transferred and graduated from the University of Arizona. My worries swirled around how I would do in English and Algebra. Contrast that with my father. In 1942 he was seventeen, just having graduated from Bisbee High School in Arizona, he was enlisted in the U.S. Army and preparing to get to Basic Combat Training Duration.
When I was 19 I was still a U of A Wildcat, trying to pass my Religion, Literature, and Psychology courses for my Liberal Arts requirement. When my Dad turned 19 he was recovering from a reconstructed, wounded foot that just did not want to heal. He was at the VA Hospital near Temple, Texas, having been brought home after stepping on a light-scale land mine in Germany about ten months after D-Day. That size device was designed to maim the unsuspecting troop, requiring the members of the squad to be tied up dealing with the soldier.
With no benefit of antibiotics, the medical care workers at the VA did an amazing job rebuilding his foot, little by little, getting it to heal. In the long process, everyone, including my dad, was fully expecting the need for amputation. My dad said he was almost hoping for it, given that the attempts to heal the foot had taken so many months. He had been at the hospital longer after the injury than he had been in the army before the injury.
So again, the contrast: my challenge was making it to class on time from my house, three blocks off campus; he was staying alive. In his memoirs, he writes that his squad was attempting to cross an area as carefully and quickly as possible. They needed to get to a spot with better coverage: a better vantage for their operation. When he stepped on the mine, it threw him up in the air, and he landed on his behind, sitting straight up. He looked around and saw all of his buddies on the ground laying low. He shouted out to them, “We can keep moving, it was not mortar fire, only a land mine.”
Because of his experiences, I am confident that when he read from the Book of Psalms, he did so with greater experiential insight than I, when I read them. The author of most of the psalms, David, had been through harrowing experiences of battle, survived illness, and escaped other dangers. This Sunday, we read Psalm 30 in church, and the caption reads: “Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness: A Song at the dedication of the temple.” Read carefully through the first four verses. Read it as would one who had come through something, not knowing whether survival was even a possibility:
1 I will exalt you, O Lord,
because you have lifted me up *
and have not let my enemies triumph over me.
2 O Lord my God, I cried out to you, *
and you restored me to health.
3 You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead; *
you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.
4 Sing to the Lord, you servants of his; *
give thanks for the remembrance of his holiness.
My father, if he had ever looked over this psalm, might have thought of those days after the blast, getting stabilized, and getting to a facility. He might have thought of those months in the Temple or Killeen area, glad when they finally sent him home to Bisbee, so he could make ready to do his studies at The U of A. (Oh, another contrast to me. He graduated with honors.) I bet if he did ever think on those times of survival, I am not sure that he did until he wrote his memoirs, he might have wanted to sing a song of thanks, as indicated in the fourth verse above.
How about you? Have you had serious and dramatic times of survival? Perhaps like me, your “survival” experiences allow you the privilege of reading this psalm more figuratively. Maybe you recall challenges that were not life and death ones. In either case, we are called to give thanks to God who in all kinds of ways, lifts us and restores our life as we are going down to the grave. God lifts and restores. The Hebrew verb for “lifted” in verse one is the same one used for lifting a bucket from the water well. You can think of Joseph in the Genesis account of the Old Testament, lifted out of the pit into which he was thrown, or Daniel coming up from the lions’ den. You can think of Jesus, being brought up from “Hades” by the Father.
Certainly, since this Psalm is paired with the Sunday Gospel—you should think of the young Galilean girl, twelve years of age, whom Jesus pulled up out of death. The mourning of family and friends was commencing, but Jesus said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” Did she hear, or see, or feeling anything? Was it like rising out of a deep well? I can only imagine. But up she came, restored to life and health. So will you be lifted? Up from that predicament, you will be liberated. And in your final predicament, the one that marks your transition from this life to a new life in the love of God, up you will come, out from the life you have experienced, and the death you have experienced, lifted to “the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of God’s saints.”