In Pleasant Places
“Lord, you are my portion and my cup of blessing;
you hold my future. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.” Psalm 16:5-6 CSB
I started to memorize Psalm 16 in the spring or summer of 2020. I don’t really remember why I chose this particular Psalm. Maybe it was the closeness of the Lord in the verses, that he is a refuge, at my right hand, will not abandon, and in his presence is abundant joy. But there was something that drew me to it. Now, looking back, I can see the nudging of the Holy Spirit. That God, being eternal and outside of time, knew what was going to happen in September of that year and guided me to scripture that would really matter in the darkness. Specifically, verses five and six. I will admit, these verses made me angry at first. They were not what I wanted to hear, and they were hard to believe. I could know with my mind that they were true but trusting their words, and finding hope in them, was not something I wanted to do.
“Lord, you are my portion and my cup of blessing.” I did not want these words to be enough. I remember a moment when I was in the hospital after our accident and Michael’s death where I was staring at a ceiling tile, angrily talking with God. I told the Lord that while I knew having him was greater than having anything else, at that moment if I had the choice between having God and having Michael, I would choose Michael. So, for David to tell me in this Psalm that God is his portion, that having God was enough, only led me to frustration. I did not want God to be enough. I often still do not want God to be enough. I want to need other things and I want God to give them to me because I need them. I want Michael back, so I wish I needed him since God gives us what we need. This is not the truth, though. I do not need Michael; I only need the Lord and the Lord gives me himself freely. That is the good news. Over the two and a half years since Michael’s death, this phrase has moved from a frustration to a humbling joy. In the beginning I saw “Lord, You are my portion” as exclusionary and, in God’s grace, I now see it as a glorious gift. Out of the entire world, the part that is allotted to me, the part that belongs to me, is God. The God of the universe has allotted himself to me. I belong to the Lord and he belongs to me. This takes my breath away. I may, in this broken world, want something more than just the Lord, but the truth of the gospel is I get to have him and I am learning, day by day, that having him is enough. He is my portion.
He is also my cup of blessing. This verse is one that I instinctively want to skip over. Thinking about blessings makes me nervous. I feel like I am getting a little too close to the prosperity gospel. But God does bless. This is the truth. He does not bless me more if I act a certain way. His blessings are not something to earn, but they are real, and he does give them to us joyfully. I also skip over this phrase because I do not actually know what it means for the Lord to be a cup of blessing. When I do press in, however, there is beauty and comfort in these words. What do we do with cups? We drink from them. If Christ is my cup, then he is what I drink from. The world leaves me thirsty. My flesh leaves me empty. But I have a cup that quenches and nourishes. It is the Lord. And when I drink from the Lord, there is blessing. Not when I go to church enough, or give enough money, or serve well do I receive blessing. I experience God’s blessing when I drink from him. When I abide in him, when I engage with him, when he is my source of hope, joy, and fulfillment. After Michael died, it eventually became easy to see the ways God was blessing me, to see how he was good. I live near a world-class hospital and got excellent treatment, I had friends who worked at the hospital who could visit me despite the Covid visitation restrictions, I had a church that cared for my family, I had parents and in-laws who could help with the kids, I was alive when the accident should have caused my death too. The blessings abounded. It was hard to be grateful for the blessings, to praise God for those blessings, when the one thing I wanted was not there.
Now, two and a half years later, when I think about God being my cup of blessing, I am reminded of the other blessings of God, the ones that became more tangible to me after loss. That he is never changing, that he mourns with me, that he trades my heavy burdens for his easy yoke. These things that were true about God became blessings from God. And the greatest blessing? When I drink from the cup of the Lord, I receive him. I am thirsty and he gives me himself, fully and freely. His presence quenches my longings and satisfies my soul. He is my cup of blessing.
You hold my future. This may be the only phrase in these two verses that I wanted to hold onto in the beginning of my suffering. By God’s grace and the Spirit’s indwelling, I never doubted that the Lord was trustworthy. I may not have cared too much about what the Lord had to say, but I still believed he was sovereign, and I could trust him with that power. Everything about my future changed the instant that vehicle hit our motorcycle. There was not a moment in my life that would ever be the same again. I also lost all control of my future at that moment. Or I lost the façade that I had any control over my future. There was nothing I could have done to make my life look the way I wanted it to and there was no more pretending that I could. There is, however, someone who is in control of my future. Who holds it in the palm of his hand and I was so grateful it was someone I could trust. The one who created the universe, who made beauty and passion, who left his heavenly throne to walk the earth as a human, who died for sins and conquered death, who will one day wipe every tear from every eye and reign as prince of peace and king of kings. He holds my future, and he is the only one I want for the job.
Now we get to the part that made me the angriest, the sections of these verses that were the hardest to believe were true for me. “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.” It is one thing to believe that God is in control of my future and even that his plans for me are for his glory and the good of his church. It is another to believe that those plans, that the suffering he has allowed, could lead to a life that is pleasant and beautiful. On a day I am feeling gracious, I can even get on board with having a beautiful inheritance. As a co heir with Jesus, there is a new heaven and a new earth awaiting me someday and that is an inheritance that is beautiful. This is future thinking, after-this-life thinking. Push through the hard life on earth and then you receive something beautiful. There is so much truth in this, but I do not think the pleasant and the beautiful are only intended for us, for me, in heaven. If you will let me put on my English teacher hat (although I was a history teacher) for a minute, I can explain why. The boundary lines have fallen. Have fallen is in the present perfect tense, which means it is a state that began in the past and continues in the present. This is not future tense; this is past and present. This means that in my life with Michael, the boundary lines had fallen in pleasant places. It means that when Michael died, the boundary lines had fallen in pleasant places. It means that right now, in this life as a widow and a single mom, the boundary lines are currently falling, are presently set up, in pleasant places. This does not mean that every day of life is happy and easy, but that in Christ, there is pleasant-ness to be found, today. There is so much hope in this truth, in this gift of the Lord. While staring at the ceiling tiles in my hospital room or being unable to get upstairs in my house because of needing a wheelchair and doing all of this without my husband, I did not want hope. I wanted a time machine, I wanted change. Honestly? I wanted grief.
One of the glorious things about our Lord is that even though he does set the boundary lines of our lives in pleasant places, he does not expect us to always feel pleasant. We do not have to force happiness when our place does not feel pleasant. Instead, he wants us to come to him with our pain, to tell him that where he has placed us does not feel good. We can even tell him that we think he is a liar, that he said he would have our boundary lines fall in pleasant places, but the circumstances of our lives seem to prove differently. God welcomed my grief, pain, and anger. He opened his arms and called for me to rest my head in his lap or bang my fists on his chest, whatever I needed. And while life did not feel good, there was no place more pleasant to be than the arms of my Savior, my prince of peace. God is our comfort, our refuge, our hiding place. When our earthly lives are falling apart and consumed by pain, He is the place we can go. Right now, today. When our earthly lives are anything but pleasant, the arms of our Father are a pleasant place and because of his abundant grace, those arms are firmly set within our boundary lines. Right now, today.
In Christ,