The One Who Lifts My Head

Reading the word of God is a strange and wondrous thing.

Sometimes I can go four chapters in without the sense I’ve found anything unusual or particularly striking, only to have the verses emerge wholesale in my mind two years later at a time of desperate need.  Sometimes I go looking for something and don’t find what I think I want.  And sometimes—the very best times—I go looking and find what I didn’t know I needed.

That happened recently as I read Psalm 3:3.  I’ll use the Amplified Bible translation as I find it particularly lovely here: “But You, O Lord, are a shield for me, My glory [and my honor], and the One who lifts my head.”

The One who lifts my head.

I spend a lot of my time in my prayer looking up, metaphorically and sometimes even physically.  When I visualize talking to God, and I often do, I imagine myself….well, not here.  Somewhere outside my bedroom and my house.  Somewhere up there, where Isaiah and John got to glimpse wonders.  And when I am struggling, I find myself maintaining this posture even more: looking up, pleading, casting glances to the sky.  Even when I imagine Jesus at my side I have to put Him there, calling Him from glory to the frustrations of my prayer.

This is, I know, theologically incorrect.  But it’s also a very human habit. 

Psalm 3:3, however, is an immediate, startling reminder that the posture I typically keep with God is not correct.  I am not yelling my prayers up at Him; He is right here, in the mud and the dirt, close enough to touch.  But even that’s not why I love this verse, why it caught and captured me.  It’s because of the gentleness here, and the intimacy.

To have one’s head lifted, one’s head must first be bowed.  And although this can be a reverent posture, it is also a posture associated with hurt, sorrow, and brokenness.  We bow our heads when we are so broken by grief we cannot help but cry.  We bow our heads when we have grown too weary and frustrated to carry on. We bow our heads when we cannot take it any more, a physical sign of surrender and vulnerability.

No shame in admitting my head has been bowed a lot over the past year.

We bow our heads, too, from shame and from guilt.  When we can’t look people in the eye, or don’t feel that we deserve to do so.  When we can’t find our own worth in the mess we’ve made.  When we don’t see another way out. 

That’s why although some scholars read Psalm 3:3 in a triumphant way—as though the Lord is lifting the Psalmist’s head up in victory and triumph rather than lifting the head of someone in sorrow or pain—I can’t, particularly given the context of the Psalm.  So many of the Psalms, and this one too, have a deep woundedness in them: the sense of being crushed and broken, of calling out from the heart of one’s needs. Of God tending to us in hurt and sorrow and difficulty.

To identify God here as “the One who lifts my head” is to credit God with a deeply loving gesture.

You can see it, I’m sure.  The hand cupping the chin, tilting the face up.  Or lingering on the side of the face, encouraging.  It’s a deeply intimate, deeply affectionate gesture.  Everything about it screams tenderness, concern, attentive engagement, fondness and caring.

To have such a gesture come from God is utterly marvelous and lovely and extravagant.

 I understand that some don’t like lingering on the more tender parts of God’s character.  For whatever reason, in some circles, there’s a preference for thunder and roaring, for might and strength.  Fair enough.  God is mighty.  God is strong.

But God is love itself, with all the passion, tenderness, gentleness, patience, and affection that entails.  We see this embodied in Christ.  The psalmist saw it, too, as a part of God’s very character.  It was God who would crush his enemies, yes.  But it was God first who would find him in the midst of his overwhelm and his difficulty and reorient him with tenderness and attentive love.  Who would direct his gaze where it needed to be.

Here’s something I have come to learn: too many trials and too much pain can confuse us, a little bit, about God.  Hurt badly enough for long enough and sometimes you start blaming God for the hurt.  And even if He is taking you through it, some small part of you begins to wonder—since He is letting you live through this—if He really cares at all.

But again, Psalm 3:3 is deeply reorienting.  He does care.  And He is enduring the hurt with us.

In Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes:

Mysteriously, God does not take away our vulnerability.  He enters into it.  …God did not keep bad things from happening to God Himself. […] So in hardship we do not look to Jesus as one who has been there before, once upon a time in a distant past.  We find he is here with us, in the present tense.  He participates in our suffering, even as—mysteriously—in our suffering we participate in the fullness of Christ’s life.

God meets us where we are in our pain.  He remains present.  Whether I am ashamed over my behavior or simply broken with exhaustion from all the trials of being here in the world, He is paying attention.  He is the One who lifts my head. 

That is the God I keep close.  Or rather, He is the God who keeps close to me.