Read: Psalm 65:1-13

You water its furrows . . . softening it with showers. (v. 10)

Halfway through our poem we come to five one-word definitions of prayer. The first is perhaps the oddest: “softness” can have such a negative ring to it—think of phrases like soft in the head, a soft defense, soft in the middle—and the “soft clothing” that characterizes the kind of people among whom (Jesus suggests) his coarsely clad preacher cousin John is unlikely to be welcomed (Luke 7:25). Is softness really to be one of our main objects in praying?

But then consider the opposite: not things that are already soft, but hard things that need “softening.” Here prayer comes into its own. It can deal with hard hearts. It can unravel hard problems. It can break up hard ground. It can answer hard questions. It can put a smile on hard faces. It can nerve the Lord’s people to face hard, indeed impossible, challenges.

We find this “softness” metaphor in the last part of Psalm 65. It belongs to the way the Lord manages the agricultural year for the benefit of those who farm his land. In the middle part of the psalm we have already been shown the worldwide scope of his operations, a vast management scheme of which Israel is only the local expression. And amazingly, the One who carries out all this “softening” is (as the opening verses have already told us) the God who has placed the center of his worldwide operations right here among us, in Zion.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

Prayer (I)

BY GEORGE HERBERT

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tower,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days-world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood.

The land of spices; something understood.

Prayer:

May we think of you among us as the CEO of Universal Softeners, Inc.?

Author: Michael Wilcock

 

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