To give thanks is to make a commitment

Psalm 30 is a Hymn of Thanksgiving, a hymn of one totally committed to God.  The speaker thanks God for having saved him from sickness and disaster, though we don’t know specifically what.  Then he invites the congregation of believers to join in his praise

In the middle he remembers when his world came crashing down, and God seemed to disappear.  Then he pleads to God, arguing for his help.  Finally, again he claims the joy that God has given him in saving him: “You have turned my wailing into dancing!”

We had said the Psalms often tell a story.  One of the most prominent stories is the one that starts in our comfortable orientation, where everything seems good; moves to an unsettling, maybe crushing disorientation; through to a re-orientation where God rearranges the pieces and puts them back together.

We are all trying to see the meaning of our world and make choices that make sense of the present and that move toward the future.  But we can’t always see clearly, and there are always twists and turns, as if our “life GPS”, in small and big ways, is constantly saying “recalculating”.  Often we are focusing on these few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, when if we just looked at the picture on the box, we could see which pieces don’t belong and which ones do.

That big picture is what God wants to remind us of.  He wants to take us to the mountain top and show us our final destination that will make sense of the twists and turns along the way; even though, as the speaker says in the middle of the Psalm, that reminder may seem like God is “hiding his face” from us.

To give thanks is to make a commitment to God, to hold on to the reality of Jesus, and grow to understand what that means in our lives.