Sometimes (like nowadays) it is impossible to keep up with how many hells we are going through at once. A killer pandemic. Killer hurricanes, floods, and fires. Killer fears and divisions in our communities and world.

We could even acknowledge that we die many deaths within one lifetime. The writer of Psalm 116:1-9 found words for this human experience:

"The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol lay hold on me. I suffered distress and anguish."

Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger, Jr., in their 2014 book, Psalms, define Sheol as "the realm of the dead, the underworld. The view of death that typifies the Hebrew Scriptures is that at death, people descended to Sheol, sometimes named the Pit. Sheol is a place of no return, a prison that offers no release." (p.500)

"Sheol can also be portrayed as the power of death that invades life and diminishes it. The petitioner in Psalm 116 has suffered a sojourn in Sheol, gripped by the power of death, with the fullness of life diminished. Death has stalked this person of faith and brought severe anguish. . . .God brought this one up from the encounter with Sheol and death, back to wholeness in the land of the living." (p. 500)

This is wondrous! To come forth, to walk onward from a place of no return, to walk with deep joy again in God's light and love.

Though the Psalms hardly ever speak of human love for God, this psalm does! And no wonder.

If verses 1 and 2 were spoken in the first person, which I imagine they were, originally, during solitary prayer, we would hear this psalmist say:

"I love you, God! You have heard the voice of my distress! Because you inclined your ear to me, therefore I will call on you as long as I live."

What a beautiful way to commune with God. What a powerful way to remind ourselves that, by God's steadfast faithfulness to us, we are never without a way through to "the land of the living."(v.9)