In recent months I’ve noticed a repeated theme in the psalms:  a conviction that God’s justice is intact, no matter the circumstances.

The psalmist might speak amid exile, the destruction of God’s own city, being subjected to death threats, being abandoned by neighbors and friends . . . and though sometimes the voice of lament and despair is louder than the voice of hope that all will be well (and I am glad of this for there is truthtelling about such moments), it is interesting to me that a vision of right relationship, with God and among all creation, is what gets most  held up to our view over and over.

Is it more powerful–or less–that this vision of a just order is held up amid circumstances that directly contradict that vision?

Surely we can have no hope if we can not see testimonies to it amid the most dire of situations.

It nudges us towards hope, just noticing that our spiritual forebears oriented towards an image of a just God even when there was no evidence in the world itself for that God’s reality.

Only the evidence of an image formed in the crucible of the heart’s prayer.

Something delights me about the elusiveness of this God, the elusiveness of divine justicemaking–though never about the tragedies that test our trust in it.

If we could empirically verify–uncontestably in the eyes of all–the God in whom we hope, what would be lost?�