“The Lord Almighty is
with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah” -Psalm 46:7
Selah. If you’ve spent any
time in the Psalms you’ve probably seen that word before. It almost looks like
an accident, just hanging out over there on the right side of the page.
Ironically enough, that’s actually one of the translations of the word. To hang.
It refers to the way things were weighed. You would hang meat or produce on a scale of sorts to determine
its value. The second translation is more about music. Selah was used to indicate that there is to be a musical interlude
at that point in the song. The Psalms were actually sung accompanied by musical
instruments. This would give direction to the accompanying musicians to break
in at the place marked with Selah,
while the singers' voices were hushed. It was an instruction for those singing
the prayers to “stop and listen”. Whichever translation you end up hanging your coat on I think
they complement one another nicely. As if to say,“Stop and listen. Let what
you’ve just heard hang inside of you long enough to notice it’s value”. Let it
settle. This word occurs seventy-one
times in thirty-nine of the Psalms. That makes me think it must be fairly
important.
I was lost in the
woods once. In college I had come up with a brilliant idea to take a girl I
liked on a day hiking trip. All had gone well, until I realized I had timed the
whole thing wrong. We were about 1 hour from the trail head at sunset and I had
not packed any flashlights or headlamps. We were in trouble. The date was
obviously ruined. Intelligence ranked number 1 on her future spouse
priority chart and she had just come to realize that I didn’t have one
ounce of it. Unfortunate for her, however, at this point I was all she had. We
walked until daylight gave out. It was completely dark. We tried crawling on
our knees using our hands to feel for the trail. I did have matches, so we tried lighting part
of a t-shirt on fire to make a torch. It wouldn’t stay lit. We were freaking out. I stopped to lay on my
back and gather my thoughts. That’s when I saw it. The moon. It was lit up in a way that exposed the trail
from above. The trail wasn’t just cleared out on the ground. It was cleared out
in the sky by the missing tree tops. The moon led us back to our car. We had to
look up rather than looking down. I felt clever for a minute, but the reality
was I didn’t find the moon. It found me. The moon had been there lighting that
path day after day before I ever came along. I merely stopped long enough to notice
it.
I am not very good at
finding God. I never have been. And I spent so much time early in life
believing that until I “got good” at finding God all hope was lost for me. I’m
starting to see that being bad at finding God is a pretty big part of being
human. And that’s ok, because he is really good at finding me. He has been finding
me all along. The most I can do is be found by God. It does, however, require
stopping. It’s much harder to be found when you’re on the run. Prayer is being
found by God. Prayer is recognizing him. It is stopping and listening for the
voice of the one who has been finding you all along. It is important to create a time and a spot
for that listening to happen. Not because God needs me to pray, but because I
need to hear the voice of the one who reminds me that I’m worth finding. It
helps me spend less time trying to be found by everyone else.
Selah is a word that
reminds us to stop and let the music break in. The real music.
Selah.
“How do you know me?
Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig
tree before Philip called you.” - John
1:48
