It doesn’t seem to matter where you are, everyone seems to do it. On a bus, in cars, on trains, walking down the street. Everyone has little ear buds in and a trailing wire attached to a phone or MP3 player, and you can bet your last pound that they are listening to music. If you have sat next to them, you will have heard the tinny bass beat that makes the actual track untraceable. People travelling through life with songs that accompany them.
If you do this, it can almost appear that your whole life is a film with a soundtrack – swelling strings, a driving beat, hopeful or sad voices that track your emotions.
We’re not the first generation to do this – we are just the first to have it made so convenient for us.
The Psalms – all 150 of them – are the Bible’s songs that accompany the people of God as they go about their lives. Songs for days of joy, songs of awe, songs for confident days, songs for fearful days, songs to lament with. Songs for whole life. And they are sung to God. So they express our hopes and fears, our desires and regrets, our joy and our pain. And to such an extent at times that sometimes you wonder whether they ought to be in the Bible at all. Aren’t they a little vindictive at times? Don’t they sound too arrogant? Too self-confident? Too angry with God and everyone else?
Over the summer we will look at some of these psalms – songs sung to God, at certain times in certain places that allow us to live our whole life confidently in his presence.
