Praise the Lord.

I hope it’s not just me, but when I don’t know what to read in the Bible, I’ll flick to a random Psalm. You always know there will be something in there and God will speak to you.

This morning, I didn’t know what to write about, I’m still dealing with a lot of heavy thoughts from what I shared in yesterday’s devotional so didn’t have much mental space to plan it. But this morning I flicked through and ended up on Psalm 42.

It starts very familiar: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you. But then, verse 5 hit me.

Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God! For I shall still praise Him for the saving help of His presence.

There's so much honesty in that one verse. David isn't pretending. He isn't saying "everything is fine."

He is asking his own heart why it is so disturbed, the way you might sit a tired friend down and ask them gently what is going on. And then he tells himself what to do next.

Hope in God. For I shall still praise Him.

Still.

I can't stop thinking about that word. It's the same word that lives inside "help me trust You're still good." The same word that makes yesterday's prayer mean anything at all. Still. In spite of. Even though this awful thing happened.

And I've been wondering if that little word is where trust and praise quietly meet.

I used to think trust and praise were different things that belonged to different days.

Trust for the harder ones. Praise for the easier ones. That the feeling came first, then the posture.

But David holds them in the same breath. I shall still praise Him. Not because the hard thing is over. Because He is still there.

And he makes me wonder if it also works the other way around. If sometimes you lift your hands first, and the heart slowly follows.

Because here's the honest thing. Praise the Lord isn't really a feeling. It's a direction. It's my face turning up instead of down. It's me admitting, even when I don't have a tidy sentence to offer, that the One I'm turning toward is worth turning toward.

So today, if you're still sitting in yesterday's prayer, I'm right there with you. But maybe, together, we can let the hands go up a little. Not because anything has changed. Just because He is still worth it.

Praise the Lord.

And maybe, slowly, the heart catches up to what the hands already know.