Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell. Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God. —Psalm 43:3-4
It sounds romantic to us now, but as a shepherd boy watching the flocks, David was the equivalent of a night watchman sitting in a booth and making sure nobody breaks into a storage facility. Anybody who has held a job in security knows there is nothing special about it. It’s boring, unglamorous, mundane work. You sit there filing your nails, listening to the radio, counting the crickets chirping outside. You don’t even want to admit to your friends that you have a job like that. I can picture David, a young teenager sitting in the fields behind his house, playing his guitar, and biding his time. Nobody cared to hear the songs he composed on his nondescript, homemade harp. But as he wandered those back hills of Bethlehem and looked up at the stars, something caught his attention, and he began to sing, “I don’t know You very well, but I love You. I want to know You. What are You like? Who are You? What is my life about?” What did David see? What did God whisper to his heart that became the foundation of who he was to become?
{ PRAYER STARTER }
Father, like David, the little shepherd boy who spent his hours isolated and alone, teach me to spend my life in discovering who You are and what You want my life to be.
What did David find in the long hours of gazing on
God’s beauty in the stars and the sunsets?
