By Theodore A. Griffin
Sometimes, you have no other choice but to engage in a conversation with your soul.
Like a presiding judge who overrules, in court, the objection of a defense attorney, you must often overrule your soul and redirect your soul because it wants to engage in a completely different narrative than what you know you should engage in.
If allowed, your soul can take you down an emotional and spiritual path that can be disastrously destructive.
Sometimes, your soul wants you to be angry at God, yourself and others. That anger wants to consume you with self-blame, discouragement, fear, depression and even suicide. But because you know that there is a better way than any of these options, you often must overrule and redirect your soul.
Psalm 103 represents one of King David’s most potent and instructive soul conversations. David provides us with no context for this conversation other than to title it “Of David,” which only lets us know that he is its author.
We cannot say definitively, therefore, what David was facing, feeling or dealing with existentially. But in it, he summons his soul and himself to praise God.
“Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and all that is within me,
bless his holy name!” — Psalm 103:1
Call it self-talk, personal admonition or whatever you will. David is having a soul conversation. He is engaging in a conversation with himself.
It is a conversation in which he commands his soul to go in the direction he needs it to go. That direction is toward God with praise and blessing. Twice he commands his soul to engage in the act of blessing God. The word bless is from the Hebrew word barak, which means to bless or to kneel before God in submission.
These two definitions are significant. They speak to both a physical and an internal posture.
First, if the soul is involved, then you are speaking about your internal disposition, which includes your mind, your will and your emotions. If these are going to kneel before the Lord, then that speaks to both a submission and an alignment with God’s will and his perspectives. That is never easy because your flesh will never take a subordinate position to the Spirit apart from rigorous training and discipline.
Second, it is only from a posture of kneeling in prayerful subordination before God that one is enabled to turn anger, fear, frustration, discouragement and depression into blessing.
Obviously, that does not negate that there are existential realities that make this kind of soul conversation difficult. Who will dispute that the year gone by, with its pandemic, mounting death toll, racial tensions, political chaos, etc., is a prima facie case in point?
But that does not mean that soul conversations are impossible either. The fact is that soul conversations can be helpful in causing you to surmount these very challenges to the extent that they change your perspective and redirect your focus.
Whatever your current existential reality, and it may be very difficult, you can command your soul to kneel before the One who is the Lord. You can direct your soul to bless God.
You can summon your soul to seek God’s help in freeing you from the strongholds of anger, discouragement, fear, frustration, depression and even suicidal ideation.
My prayer is that God will bless you and keep you; that he will cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; that he will lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace (Numbers 6:24-26).
The Rev. Theodore A. Griffin is lead pastor at Brown’s Chapel Wesleyan Church in Greenfield. This weekly column is written by local clergy members. Send comments to dr-editorial@ greenfieldreporter.com.
