How Shall I Repay?

How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? I shall lift up the cup of salvation … Psalm 116

When our children were young, we would say the grace I learned when I was a child: God is great; God is good; let us thank him for our food. We taught our children to say it properly, but inside my head I always wanted food to rhyme with good. Linguists tell us the words did so in the past, but our pronunciation of the word “good” has moved on.

Life is like that, I suppose. It moves on. A woman I know once remarked, “There are pillars and there are caterpillars. Pillars hold things up, but caterpillars move on and become butterflies!” While few people will admit they like change, the fact is most of us want change of one sort or another. It’s just that we prefer to have a say in what that change will look or feel like, or how much discomfort or pain we’ll have to endure to obtain what we’re after.

As the psalmist implies in the psalm, God is good. I suppose that’s why God does good things for us. I know God is good and delights in doing good. I’d like to think I’m the same way (having been made in the image of God), and yet counting my blessings often makes me feel more guilty than blessed.

It’s like when someone pays you a compliment, I never know what to do with it. I blush. I stutter and stammer. I insist it was nothing, or the product was mediocre at best. And then I think my modesty isn’t genuine, because inside I’m also pleased as punch, and that just makes me feel even guiltier than when I started the cycle of pleasure and guilt.

I think my relationship with God is like that sometimes. I am sure God is pleased whenever I do something nice, right, good, or loving. I am sure God looks at the honorable things we say and do and puffs out his godly chest and calls the angels of heaven together into some heavenly huddle and says, “Attsa my boy, down there!” or “Attsa my girl doing that!”

I am sure that’s what’s going on in God’s head and heart, and yet for some reason I can’t fathom, I can’t shake the fact that I still think of God and me in some sort of transactional relationship. Maybe it is because so much of the language we use has a monetary tone to it.

God paid for my sins. That implies I owe God. God redeems us. Oh, so now I am a coupon to be turned in for something better, newer, shinier?  Jesus saves. So I am a coin tossed into the darkness of a piggy bank. Wait … God can’t have a piggy bank; it wouldn’t be kosher!

Those are things my head tells me, and the psalmist seems to know it instinctively, too, for he asks quite clearly, “How shall I repay the Lord?”

He answers, “I shall lift up the cup of salvation!”

Have you ever hoisted a glass or cup and offered “Cheers!” to a person or group? What does it mean? It means “I only want the best for you, in abundant appreciation for who you are and, more importantly, what you mean to me.”

This is the blessing we offer to our children when they are baptized or married: “You are a child of God, a great gift from God, and I shall never forget that as long as we are alive!”

“You are a child of God, most loved and beloved. I do not abandon you when you cleave unto another – when I “give” you away; I embrace the one you embrace and treasure you all the more!”

Life and love don’t always work out that way or that well, but that’s our goal; that’s our target; that’s our hope and desire, and I believe that is God’s hope and desire for us as well, for the psalmist adds one more thing: “Precious in the sight of the Lord are those God loves.” Meaning?

We see caterpillars in the mirror; God sees butterflies. So spread your wings (but keep your CV-19 distance) here in this, God’s precious valley.