There is a small word running through Psalm 62 that the English keeps changing.
Ak. It appears six times, and our translations render it alone, only, but, surely — reasonably enough, because it is a hard word to carry across. It is not the word for solitude. It is a fencing word. It puts something inside a boundary and says: this, and nothing more.
David sets it down at the start and does not let go of it.
For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.
He uses it of God twice in two verses. Then, before the psalm is over, he uses it of everything else — of the men who scheme against him, of humanity itself.
The first thing David says about being alone with God is that his soul waits in silence.
The word is dumiyyah — stillness. And the striking thing is that David does not describe this as something that happens to him. Later in the psalm he commands it: dommi, be still. He says it to his own soul, as though his soul were someone else who needed telling.
He does this more than once. In Psalm 131 he says he has calmed and quieted his soul, and the picture he reaches for is a weaned child with its mother — not a child waiting for milk, but a child that has stopped reaching for it. In Psalm 37 he tells the reader to be still before the LORD and wait for him. It is a settled habit of his, this business of ordering his own soul to be quiet.
Which tells us that stillness is not patience. Patience is waiting for something to arrive. What David is describing is nearer to the removal of everything that is in the way.
I know what is in the way, because I put it there most mornings. The phone is in my hand before the reading is, and by the time I reach the psalm there have been messages, and news, and three things somebody needs an answer to. None of it is wicked. All of it is noise, and the noise gets first hearing.
David does not say he is being still in order to see God more clearly. He gives no reason at all; he simply gives the order. But it is what stillness makes possible. It isn't until it is God, and you are alone, that you realise it is God alone.
Read verses 1 and 2 next to verses 5 and 6 and you will notice they are nearly the same lines.
For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
for my hope is from him.
He only is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
Nearly the same — but not quite, and the difference is everything. The first time, David is reporting. My soul waits in silence. It is a statement of fact about himself. The second time, he is commanding. Wait in silence, O my soul. He is telling himself to do what he has just finished saying he does.
Between the two there is an assault. Verses 3 and 4 are men leaning on him like a wall about to fall, taking pleasure in falsehood, blessing with their mouths and cursing inwardly. And there is a Selah — a pause, a rest, a place where the music stops and you are left holding what has just been played.
So this is the shape of it. He says God is his rock. He is battered. He has to say it again, and the second time it is not a report but an order he gives himself.
There is believing something. There is saying it again when it is being tested.
In February my heart stopped.
I did not wait on God. I did not hold on. I was not quietly trusting while others worked. There was nobody there to do any of it. I was dead, and whatever was happening in that room was happening without me.
Everything I had said for a working life about God being a rock and a fortress — said at gravesides and at weddings and in prisons — was somewhere I could not reach and could not have reached for. It was God alone in the plainest sense there is. Not God first, not God as well. God, with the fence drawn round, and me outside it along with everything else.
The waiting came afterwards.
That is where the stillness was: in the weeks after, when there was nothing to do but be still and wonder what now. What of my life. What was it for, this bit that had been handed back. There was no noise in that. Everything that usually clutters the morning had been cleared out by the size of what had happened, and what was left was God and me and a great deal of time.
And what I found there was hesed. His steadfast love — not as a word I had preached, but as the thing that had been underneath the whole time and that I had never seen properly because I had never been in a position to need it that plainly.
This website exists because of those weeks.
What David does next is the thing I did not expect.
He does not keep it. He turns outward, to everybody:
Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us.
The word is batach — to trust, to lean your weight on something. And notice that David does not tell the people to be silent. He tells them to pour out their hearts. Being still before God is not having nothing to say to him. It is knowing where to bring it.
This is what being alone and waiting is called, when you give it a name. It is trust. And David has not arrived at it by argument. He has arrived at it by being battered, and having to tell his own soul twice.
I do not think he decided to turn outward. I think it is simply what happens. When you find that this is all that really matters, there isn't much else worth saying to anybody.
Then he weighs us.
Those of low estate are but a breath;
those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
they are together lighter than a breath.
The word for breath is hevel — vapour, mist, the thing that will not register on the scale. Ecclesiastes says the same of everything under the sun.
The psalm ends where this website began.
Once God has spoken;
twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God,
and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.
For you will render to a man according to his work.
Steadfast love. Hesed. Held together with power, in the same breath, as the two things that are true of God when everything else has been found to weigh nothing.
Either one on its own would be unbearable. Power without hesed is only force, and there would be no comfort in it. Hesed without power is a kind wish that cannot do anything for you at four in the morning. David has them together, and that is the rock.
Once you have seen hesed in scripture you cannot unsee it. It is in the covenant and the prophets and the psalms; it is under the whole story, holding it up. But I do not think you see it — really see it — until you have known that it is God alone. That is the order. The fence goes round first. Everything else is weighed and found to be vapour, and then what is left in your hands turns out to be steadfast love, and it turns out to have weight.
Hevel has none. Hesed has all of it.
And then that last line. It is a strange place to end. Everyone has just been weighed and found to be vapour, and now their deeds are said to count for something. Unless the work he has in mind is the one thing this psalm has asked anybody to do.
A man sits in the dark with everything against him, and he says to his own soul: be still.
He has said it before. He will have to say it again.