Today on Perry and Shawna Mornings!  Life.  It’s a journey over exhilarating mountains yet also through long and perilous and dark valleys filled with dangers, and failures, and losses, and enemies that remind us, we are not home yet.  But we know where we’re headed.  We’re headed to an eternal Kingdom ruled by a righteous, merciful and just King.   Where everything will be as it should be forever.  But we’re not there yet.  So, we need hope to keep going.  Because sometimes we feel like giving up. 

Sometimes we feel that God has forsaken us.  We need to be reminded that God is near when he seems far away.  We need to remember that God is in control.  We need encouragement to shine our light especially when we feel it won’t make one bit of a difference.  We need to be reminded that one day everything’s gonna be OK, forever.  And the ancient book of Psalms does all of this for us. It’s “a light in the darkness when all other lights go out.”  And that’s why we’re moving into the book of Psalms this week.  So first we get the 30,000 foot view of Psalms with Tim Mackie and Jon Collins of the Bible Project. 

Then Shawna shares how she has felt tired, excited, regretful, frustrated, grateful, worried, angry and overwhelmed—just over the past three days!  The journey of life will take us through the most beautiful to the most excruciating emotions.  And the Psalms invite us into feeling them all and expressing them all.  And through all the these feelings Psalm 1 is the anchor that holds us fast in the still waters and in the raging tsunamis of life!  And then we have a conversation about the darkest Psalm in the bible:  Psalm 88.  It’s ends with darkness.  Why??  For one it normalizes feelings of despair for even the most godly person and ultimately it points us to Jesus.