Mercy and restoration

Psalms 79 and 80: This week I spoke twice to high school students about journalistic writing and how it differs from other written work. One of the ideas I tried to convey is "don't get in the way of the story." Let the characters speak, and let the story tell itself without interpolations from the journalist. Be the medium, not the message. The community lament in Psalm 80 is a wonderful example of this concept, since the psalmist conveys despair and death and destruction and angy and history and pleas and suffering in 13 short verses. The descriptions are short but vivid and graphic: Jerusalem lies in ruins, blood flows like water, and there was no one to bury the dead. A tsunami of suffering and one that I can read both as a journalistic account and poetic description. Most of all the humanity of the event comes through. I can feel the pain of the people of God in this psalm, and I lament with them. And a brief word on Psalm 80, a community prayer for the restoration of the people. It continues some of the themes of destruction and abandonment of the previous psalm, and ends with a plea for God's presence: "Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved."