Psalm 119:65-72 Teth

Do good to your servant according to your word, LORD.
Teach me knowledge and good judgment, for I trust your commands.
Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.
You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees.
Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart.
Their hearts are callous and unfeeling, but I delight in your law.
It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.
The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

Psalm 119:65-72

The acrostic nature of the Psalm presents a paradox in this stanza.

David, constrained by his own poetic scheme to begin each verse with the Hebrew teth, chooses to begin many of the verses with tub or towb, meaning good or beautiful.

65 Good you did to your servant according to your word, Lord

66 Goodness of discretion and knowledge teach me, for I trust your commands.

67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.

68 Good you are, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees.

69 Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart.

70 Their hearts are callous and unfeeling, but I delight in your law.

71 Good for me that I was afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

72 Good to me is the law from your mouth, more precious than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

The paradox is in the words that come between all those good feelings and good actions and good results. This stanza is not about how everything is good and great, all sunshine and rainbows for people of faith.

No, David's topic here is affliction. The kind of suffering that comes from living in a world full of people who are decidedly not good, the kind of people who treat believers badly.

And David saw that it was good.

Probably not at first. It likely took  a lifetime of affliction to learn to see it as good. I turned 61 years old this year and I've only really started embracing the goodness of suffering over the past decade or so.

The ability to see affliction the way God sees it -- that only comes through a lifetime of trusting His commands even when they seem to be failing you. It grows out of coming back from going astray, over and over again. Perspective comes from letting God soften your heart in the hardest of ways.

But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended. Kirby died of cancer in 2008 when she was seventy-six. I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone. There is only one road.

Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

We all travel the same road, and it is rocky road. But we walk it together and we walk it with God.

And it is good.