Psalm 75 - At the Center

May 01, 2025

So, with coming to the last verse of Psalm 75, we reach the halfway point of this amazing book of songs, poems, emotion, and honesty. And I so love that at the heart of this book is a song of gratitude and thanksgiving. It isn’t necessarily completely a song of gratitude as I would express it but it is definitely one from how the writers of the day would express gratitude (there’s some of the gratitude of God’s judgment on the heedless and a contrasting between what God will do for the upright vs the “crooked”). But here’s how it starts:

We give thanks to you, endless thanks
For the nearness of your unsayableness
That we touch in the memory of your wondrous doing

There’s an action - thanks, endless thanks. Then there’s an acknowledgment of the otherness but also the near-ness of God. And then a beautiful expression of remembering what God has done in the past.

I don’t know if the book was crafted intentionally to have an expression of gratitude right at the center of the book but I love that it is how it is. It feels like how so many of the Psalms that express grief, sadness, anger, etc still also have some expression in the midst of trust, hope, and gratitude. There always seems to be a “yet will I trust” in the midst of the more painful things that are shared in the Psalms. And so here it is, right in the center of all of what has come before and all that will come after... thanks, endless thanks... the nearness of your unsayableness... touching the memory of your wondrous doing.

Two mornings ago, I fell into a beautiful flow time when out at Glenwood Gardens. It was a cool morning, some low fog around the park, an overnight rain that resulted in droplets covering seemingly every plant surface, and yellow/orange light rising. I texted this to my several folks:

Ed + cool morning + fog + sun filtered through the fog + dew droplets on everything reflecting the morning sun = flow state losing track of time

It was amazing. One of the photos was this one that feels like what I just wrote about with Psalm 75 - the beauty of those droplets holding to that single spider web between the two plants.

If we zoomed in close enough (which you’ll see in the photos to follow), you’d see a reflection (upside-down) of the sunrise in each and every one of those tiny droplets. I was so grateful for being out at the right place at the right time that morning. And I’m so grateful for this song of praise as we come to the halfway mark of the Psalms.

Here are a few more from the same walk with Scout:

And then Scout giving her expression of “Wow!” while we were out. Or maybe she was just yawning...

And then a funny - an important lesson learned this morning by me and hopefully it can be helpful to you. So, my birthday present to my wife recently was a Sodastream so we can make our own sodas at home rather than buying. We have LOVED it thus far. Well, this morning, I made a concoction that I don’t recommend. Here’s how I described it to our kids... first with a bit of background...

We made some homemade meatballs in the instant pot and froze a good number of them to use at another time. So they were on a cutting board in the upstairs freezer. Well, I took them out this morning to put in a container and apparently one of them fell off into the ice bucket.
So when I made my drink this morning of a blackberry lemonade soda and got a handful of ice, I apparently grabbed the meatball as well and didn’t realize it. So the whole time I’m driving to Kentucky I am noticing that something tastes a little funny but thinking maybe that I just mixed things weird. Anyway, I finish it up and notice in the cup that something doesn’t look like an ice cube…a meatball…

I do not recommend italian meatball blackberry lemonade soda. Here’s how I discovered officially what had happened. I saw this sight in the cup once I finished drinking it all.