When I Remember These Things, I Pour Out My Soul in Me

There is a week in the year that takes a woman I know apart, and it took her eleven years to notice that it was the same week.

She thought she was having a bad patch. She thought it every time. It would arrive, and everything would get heavier, and she would be short with people she loves, and she would think: I am tired, work is difficult, this has been a hard month.

And then one year she was looking at something else entirely and she noticed a date, and she counted backward, and she understood that she had been having the same bad patch, at the same point in the calendar, since her mother died.

She said the strangest part was that she had never connected them, and she is not a stupid woman. It arrived every year with no label on it.

I have since found out how common that is. The body keeps a calendar and does not tell anybody it is keeping one.

The psalmist knows exactly what is doing it

The forty-second psalm is a man in a bad stretch, and the thing worth noticing is that he can name the cause precisely.

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise. (Psalm 42:4, King James Version)

When I remember these things. He is not confused about what is happening to him. He knows the memory, he knows what it is a memory of, and he knows exactly what it does when it arrives.

And notice what the memory is. It is a good one. He is remembering going up with the crowd, with the voice of joy, and the remembering is what takes him apart.

That is worth sitting with, because a lot of people assume the dates that hurt must be memories of something bad. Very often they are memories of something good that is not available anymore.

Which means the weight is not evidence of anything unresolved. It is evidence that something was worth having.

You have a heaviness that is evidence of love rather than of a failure to move on, and Psalm 42 has a man taken apart by a memory of joy and never once corrects him for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a good memory from being read as a fault.

You are not confused, and the psalmist names the mechanism precisely and Scripture keeps his description of it (Psalm 42:4). The same Spirit is the one who lets a person say what is happening to them rather than calling it a bad patch for eleven years.

Scripture takes dates seriously

There is a habit all through the Old Testament of putting markers on the ground so that a date has something attached to it.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? (Joshua 4:7)

Stones set up on purpose so that a question would be asked later. That is a deliberate arrangement of memory, done in advance, by people who understood that a date arrives whether or not anybody has prepared for it.

Israel's whole year was a set of appointed times. Nobody in that world was surprised by a season.

You have permission to arrange a date rather than being ambushed by one, and Scripture is full of markers set up deliberately for exactly that (Joshua 4:7), and it is the Spirit who makes a marker something more than an entry in a calendar.

And I want to be plain about one thing before going further. Preparing for a week does not mean managing grief away. The woman I described still loses that week and expects to. What she does not do anymore is meet it without knowing what it is.

And this belongs here plainly. If that week has taken you somewhere darker than sorrow, where being here at all has come into question, that is not for an article to hold. Tell somebody before it comes round: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength, and going early is wisdom.

What the psalm actually does with it

The forty-second psalm does not resolve the way people expect, and that is why I trust it.

He asks himself a question twice, and it is the same question, and he does not answer it with an explanation.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

Hope thou in God. That is what he says to himself, and he says it twice in the psalm because the first time did not settle it.

And notice the tense. I shall yet praise him. Yet. He is not praising in that verse. He is saying that he will, from inside a stretch where he is not, which is exactly the same move Micah makes from the floor.

You are permitted to say a thing that is not yet true about your own condition, and the psalmist does it in the future tense from inside the week (Psalm 42:11), and the Spirit is the one who puts a sentence like that in somebody's mouth when nothing supports it.

Jeremiah does the same thing in Lamentations, and he tells us he is doing it on purpose.

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. (Lamentations 3:21)

This I recall to my mind. He is deliberately putting something in front of himself, in the middle of a book that is otherwise almost entirely lament. It is an act rather than a feeling.