My times are in your hand. Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, and from those who persecute me.
Psalms 31:15 (WEB)
in its setting: Psalm 31:9-16
1 Where we are
Six in the evening, and the five-foot-way outside the shop row has oranges and joss standing in rice — every unit but ours. The auntie from the minimart asks Haziq to help carry her tin drum out, then whether the cafe will chip in for the seventh-month dinner. He is twenty-two and four months in. Under his block tonight his mother is setting out the same things, and she has already asked why he will not kneel. What frightens him is not the drum. It is that his refusal will read as one more way he has walked out on them, and that a family who lately started answering the phone will stop again.
2 What the passage is doing
Psalm 31 is written by a man the street is talking about. David says his neighbours look at him with horror and people who see him coming cross the road. He is worn out, hunted, and surrounded by people putting their trust in things he calls empty. In the middle of that he does not claim he can fix the year. He says his times — the hour of his death included — sit in God's open hand.
עִתֹּתַי
'ittotai · my times, my appointed occasions
English gives us the vague word "times", but 'et means a fixed occasion — the hour a thing happens, the season it belongs to. David uses it in the plural: not one grand destiny, but every separate stretch of his life, including the bad month he is in. All of them, he says, are in a hand. Someone is holding the calendar, and it is not the calendar that decides.
3 Taking it with you
So carry the drum. Buy oranges for the dinner. Sit at your mother's table and eat what she cooks, and let her see that you have not stopped being her son. What you cannot do is borrow the dread, because Christ has already settled the account that fear keeps asking about — nothing unseen is owed anything by you, and nothing unseen can collect. And if she does not understand this year, your times are not held by her approval, or by your record, or by the month. They are held in a hand that does not need appeasing and does not let go when the seventh month ends.
A prayer you can pray
Father, tonight I will walk past the burning and the smoke, and I do not want to be afraid of it. Thank you that my times are in your hand — the good years and the wasted ones. Help me honour my family and be kind on my street without carrying a dread that is not mine. Hold me when I am not understood. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
