Issue 278
How often have you had a double concern about an issue? Concern one is the issue itself – the potential pitfall or the mistakes pending. Concern two is what people will think of you should you mess up; this concern about image only compounds the problem.
There is a very unhealthy aspect about image concern. It can drive you to attempt to spin, manipulate or decide purely on the basis of what people think. The strange part of this concern is that it is often people whom you don’t like or who don’t like you that figure most in your image management strategy. You feel that they are waiting for your downfall, wanting to gloat, finger point, and pick up any pieces of debris which will be of use to them in building their own images at your expense.
This kind of concern for your own image is very stress-inducing. It can drive you to become the victim of other people’s opinions of who you should be and what you should do. It can motivate you to act purely out of political self-interest rather than on the basis of trust, rightness or justice.
David is in such a depressed state that he is not anxious about how he will look if he is not rescued. Enemies will be able to say that they beat him and foes will have a ball at his expense.
But there is another motive to be understood here in David’s favour: the whole of this psalm is a prayer. David is questioning, wrestling, and debating with God himself. So he invokes a perfectly valid and powerful prayer technique. He is appealing to God’s own image in the knowledge that God does not want to see his own people overcome by their enemies – human or otherwise.
God rightly is jealous of his honour and his people. He wants his people to win and bring honour to his own name. He wants us to be people of victory, not defeat.
Here in the field of despair you can find some seeds of hope. David’s wrestling, restless spirit is communing with the Divine Spirit and figuring out how to appeal and how to surrender at the same time. Has it occurred to you that God is in favour of your winning? He is not willing to let you fall and be destroyed. This is not just some personal, sexual, or private battle, it includes your actual working week challenges. There are real battles for market share, client contracts, and just working practices; there are real enterprises of discovery for researchers and problem solving projects for managers; there are quests for workarounds for engineers and battles for diagnoses for doctors.
There are wages to be paid, walls to be built and teams to galvanise; there is a daily battle to find the energy you need to make it to the evening. God wants you to win; he does not want your enemies (real or imagined, internal or external) to rejoice. Literally, he wants you to have the last joyful, celebratory, righteous – laugh. It’s an image thing.
Psalm 13: 4
4 my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
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Geoff Shattock
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