Psalm Meditation 1363 ¶Proper Thirteen ¶August 2, 2026 ¶Psalm 80 ¶https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm%2080&version=NRSVUE ¶The past seems to have been so much better than the present. Everything was good back then; people cared about quality over profit, food was tastier, children were all good and respectful of their elders, and money went farther and lasted longer than it does now. It isn’t true, of course. We simply idealize the past because we are not living in it. If we lived through the times we are longing for now, we are leaving out some of the rough spots, either because others protected us from them or we blocked them out as painful or traumatic. ¶The psalmist is voicing the hurt of the nation and using the past as an indicator of what the world ‘should’ be because that is the way we have chosen to remember it. God did bring a vine out of Egypt and planted it, and we remember that God did all the heavy lifting of driving out all of ‘those’ people who had usurped ‘our’ land in the several generations we were exiled in Egypt. And not that things have gotten hard for us again, we long for the past we have in our idealized memory. The ideal and the reality are rarely the same. What we think we remember and long for, is imperfect and much more difficult than we care to admit. ¶Yet, we can wholeheartedly join the psalmist in asking God to do what God is already actively doing – to be with us. The request we would do better to make is that we be open to seeing the ways that God is with us in this and every time. We can pray that God ‘restore’ us to the future that can be rather than to a past that is nowhere near as good as the one anyone remembers. “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.” ¶July 27, 2026 ¶LCM