To Trust in Follies

Meaning in Psalm 31

Alfred D. Byrd

MANY of us have languished in troubles
Making our lives too harsh to be borne.
The world around us despises our faith
In a God perceived as absent or cold.
The world prefers to trust in follies,
Empty promises, glitter and gloss.
To those who look no further ahead,
Today is all the time that exists.
The here and now is all that matters;
Nothing is left for the world to come.
The ones caught up in buying and selling
Slander the lives of persons of faith
And lay a net to catch us in deeds
For which the world can put us to death.

Within the world, we have no refuge.
Battered and broken, we wander about
And sigh for how weak our hands have become.
When we look for help, our neighbors run off,
Afraid of our faith, though it seems to them
No more than the cause of our pain and grief.
To be in the world without our God
Is to feel forgotten, destined for death.
If we had no hope beyond this world,
How empty and useless our lives would be!

Rejoice! There is hope beyond this world.
When we call to God amid our sorrows,
Heaven opens, and blessings come down
On lives redeemed and restored to hope
By love that defeats the lies of the world.
Amid its testings, we find a refuge—
Heavenly fortress, a rock of strength—
On which we can stand while we sing from the heart,
"The goodness of God is too great to be told."
Because our God is both Light and Love,
The pride of the world will come to nothing;
Heaven will reign, and the truth will prevail.

We yield our spirits to God in faith
Because our God has known our sorrows.
Sending a life of the One among us—
Taking our likeness, the Life endured
A life of testing, a death of shame
To raise the fallen to hope on high—
Our God has felt each pain that we face,
And has made a way of escape for all
Who turn from darkness to light that shines
Forever undimmed in the house of faith.

In days gone by, we would curse our foes
And ask our God to put them to death.
The triumph of Love, however, gives us
Courage to bless the ones who curse us.
Enemies, heaven can turn to friends
When we find within us the will to forgive
And the words to ask our God to send
The Spirit of Light into hearts grown dark.
The will and the words are gifts from our God.
We were once, ourselves, the foes of the One;
We are now, through our God, the children of light.
May You send, our God, Your light to those
Who wander in darkness, and turn them about
To bring them, renewed and transformed, to You
As children of light, our friends in the truth!

If this poem spoke to you, you may enjoy my Biblical epic poems

A Song of the One, the age-old account of Creatlon, Fall, Redemption, and Glory retold in verse for a new millennium, and

The Stars Bow Down: An Epic of Joseph, the timeless tale of a favorite son whose brothers sold him into slavery, but whom God raised from a prison to save the known world from famine.