To Those Made Helpless

Meaning in Psalm 41

Alfred D. Byrd

HAPPINESS flowers in one who loves
A neighbor as much as one loves oneself.
The one who pleases our God the most
Is the one who attends to the need of others.
Giving one's time, one's wealth, and one's love
To those made helpless by pain and by grief
Is being like God, Who saw our fall
And chose, at the cost of shame and of death,
To make us a way to hope and to joy.
The one who helps the fallen rise up
Will be raised by God in a day of trouble.

Nothing, however, is easy in life.
In a world condemned by sin to darkness,
Even the righteous may suffer, may die,
For reasons ungrasped in the here and now.
Like Job, the righteous who suffer may hear
The voice of friends condemning the sick
For sins imagined that caused their pain.
Too often, we must confess to our shame,
We see in part, but we judge the whole
As if we were God, Who sees all things—
Both start and finish — with sight undimmed.
Let us have the wisdom to see ourselves
As lacking the right to judge our neighbors.
Silence is better than making a guess
When we know too little to say what's true.

The worst of griefs that we face in life
May well be hatred received from neighbors.
Enemies hurt us by telling falsehoods;
Gossip spreads them like sparks on the wind.
What starts in anger may spread like wildfire,
Burning whatever may lie in its path.
Where we saw a field of flowers at dawn,
We may see no more than ashes at dusk.
How swiftly a lie can destroy a life!
How swiftly a friend who listens to lies
Can become instead the worst of foes.

False witness may be as bad as murder;
Gossip is often a tool of death.
To speak a lie that sullies a life
Will rob a victim of joy and of hope
As much as maiming or killing would do.
Repeating rumors as proof of guilt
Is just as bad as starting a lie.
To murder a name is to take a life.
Our God requires believers to be
Upholders of truth for friend and for foe.
When we stray from the truth, we may be the cause
Of breaking the bonds between friend and friend.

AMONG the griefs that we face in this world,
The worst may well be to lose a friend.
Our God understands this worst of griefs.
The Son, becoming human to save us,
Gathered around Him a circle of friends
Whom He taught the truth, and with whom He shared
The bread of peace in joy and in grief.
A man who had known the bread and the truth
Grew filled with envy, and spurning the Son,
Betrayed Him to foes who had sought His life.
Among the griefs that He took to His death
Was grief for a friend whom He'd lost forever.

Here is the hope for which we've waited:
Dying wasn't the end for the Son.
He rose to open a way to life
For all who will call on His name in faith.
We have no god who's deaf to our cries
And blind to the sin that mars this world.
Our God understands our pain and our grief;
Our God has felt them within the Son.
Our God is with us on paths through darkness;
Heartbreak is eased when shared with our Friend.
At the end of our shame there lies our glory,
Sharing with God the bliss of His home.

Our hope is not for heaven alone,
But should spur our hearts to love this life
And our hands to try to heal its hurts.
Until the day when we live in light,
We can bring a piece of heaven to earth
By showing the love of God in our lives—
The love that is left when we lose all hope
But our hope in the One Who has shared our pain.

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.