A Heavy Darkness

A psalm of David. When he fled from his son Absalom.
1 O
LORD, how many are my foes! How many rise
up against me!
2 Many are saying of me,
"God will not deliver him."
Selah [a]
3 But you are a shield around me, O
LORD; you bestow glory on me and lift
[b] up my head.
4 To the LORD I cry
aloud, and he answers me from his holy
hill. Selah
5 I lie down and
sleep; I wake again, because the LORD
sustains me.
6 I will not fear the tens of thousands
drawn up against me on every side.
7 Arise, O LORD! Deliver me, O my
God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.
8
From the LORD comes deliverance. May your
blessing be on your people.
Selah

Footnotes:
Psalm 3:2 A word of uncertain meaning, occurring frequently in the Psalms; possibly a musical term
Psalm 3:3 Or LORD , / my Glorious One, who lifts


Today, I’m going to bare more of myself than I want to. You may ask, ‘Well, if you don’t want to, why are you?’

I’ve come to a crossroads with God, where I can’t seem to write about anything but what He places in front of me. I’ve resisted and it worked against me, as if I had just had a dose of sodium pentothal. Spy flicks would call ‘sodium pentothal’, “truth serum”.

One example from the Bible of an experience I’ve had several times in my life is found in Genesis 15:12.

“As the sun was setting, Abram fell
Into a deep sleep, and a thick and
Dreadful darkness came over him.”


It is this “thick and dreadful darkness” I continue to experience in my sleep.

The scripture passage I am borrowing from today (at the top of this post) speaks of David’s fear of his enemies and how he can lay his head down and sleep at night because God’s glory surrounds him.

What the passage from Genesis 15, Psalm 3 and my continued childhood dread has in common is that of God’s presence in a person’s life. You see, the word for ‘glory’ in Psalm 3:3 is the Hebrew word ‘kavodh’. ‘Kavodh’ comes from ‘kevedh’, meaning “honor, weight, esteem”.

From kavedh, the ‘main idea’ caused an invocation to remember the “thick and dreadful darkness” I have feared since I was a child and continue to experience from time-to-time in my sleep. The ‘main idea’ in kavedh, is to “becomes heavy”, which then “wealth” becomes. So, ‘kevedh’ can be a “wealth” of; sin, severity, intensiveness, greatness, and honor.

As a child, on occasion, during sleep, I would feel that a heavy darkness was rolling over me. It rolled over me from head to toe, literally. Quite reminds me of a steam roller for flattening newly laid asphalt.

On one occasion, after the dreadful darkness rolled across my body and I felt it’s weight, I had a dream. As dreams go, this one was an odd one. One part of it reminds me of a scene from The Wizard of Oz.

This particular dream was of my mother, sister and aunt sitting on a side porch which offered a view of the woods across the street from our farm house in Ohio. In my dream, there were fire trucks and fire fighters whom had pinned a witch up in a tree. (Told you this was a weird one. Wizard of Oz scene about to unfold) The firefighters sprayed water up into the trees and the witch dissolved.

Today, I view the dissolving witch as the defeat of evil.

My father terrorized our household when he became drunk. (Here is how I come to the conclusion of the evil being defeated and the part of the definition of ‘glory’ or ‘kavedh’). ‘Glory’ (kavedh) can mean, “honor, weight, esteem”. Now, in Psalm 3:3, David considered this ‘glory’ (kavedh) to be a shield. Certainly, nothing is going to penetrate this ‘sheild’ of God’s Glory; His weight; or, the ‘severity’ of His ‘weight’.

I can tell you of all of the unbelievable abuses endured as a child. But, there is not any point in it, here. I will simply say, I believe I was protected from death when I was a child. Having had the feeling of God’s weight on me indicates to me that God’s glory rested and seemingly, will continue to rest on me for a special purpose.

Innocent in my child hood, I can see how God, knowing and seeing the passion I would eventually have as an adult would preserve me. But, now , as an adult, I have felt less than worthy of the continued sense of God’s shield, or weight over me. I sometimes feel very worldly in my thinking and my behavior. And, I wander, what part of the definition will apply next? I want those things I find to create conflicting loyalties in my life to disappear. But, now, it is with much pain, that I must act to cause them to go away. This is where my effort will focus in the coming days. Funny, how those things of our childhood will surface to remind us and convict us.