The Deepest Longings

Why Are You Cast Down, O My Soul?

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”
These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.
By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”
As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
-Psalm 42

It seems like life is cyclical. It ebbs and it flows. At one moment, you'll read David in the Psalms praising God with the utmost rejoicings of his heart. At the next moment, he cries out, "God where are you? Why have you left me?" I find myself much like David in that regard. But whether I am rejoicing or languishing in the shaky ground of my own emotions, there is one thing that always holds true: I must continually depend on my God to sustain me. I need the grace of God to give me the reliance by which I may trust Him, both in the life-filled moments and also in the most desolate places.