I do not hide your righteousness in my heart;
I speak of your faithfulnessand your saving help.
I do not conceal your love and your faithfulness
from the great assembly.
I had read this verse before. I had even underlined it. I can tell because I was using a black ball-point pen and when I read it the most recent time, I was using a blue one. I put parentheses around the already underlined verse because I couldn’t help but re-highlight it mentally and physically. In the margins of my journal Bible I have it written, “Conviction! Do not conceal the wonders made known to you, Janie!” Sometimes I need to use my own name when speaking to myself because I can get caught up in “we” and “you” and even “me” and “I”, but when someone calls me out by name - it gets my attention. I needed myself to understand this deeper than I ever had.
It was the beginning of March and I had invited a friend to come speak to our team while we were in the same town she lived. She had asked how our bible studies were going and what we were studying. I didn’t have much of an answer because we weren’t studying much of anything. We got together seldom mainly because we were tired and also because of our limited time off the field. Olympic tour was shaping up to be a butt kicker mentally and physically. I’ll never forget the words she spoke to me: “Kindly, shame on you. Gather them weekly.” I felt the kindly and I felt the shame on me. It was a loving interpretation of Psalm 40:10. It fired me up enough to start reminding myself of my much bigger purpose aside from left fielder and lefty specialist and I was ready to refocus and reignite my missional mindset.
And then we all got sent home.
Coronavirus ramped up just a few days after she had come to visit our team and what I thought was going to be seven months on tour with my teammates turned into a month and a half with a hard stop and not knowing when I would see them again.
My word for this year is Steadfast. I haven’t been as sure as I am this year about a word since my very first word back in 2016 — which was Clarity. (That was a crazy year.) At the end of 2019 I had been reading through the Psalms and the word Steadfast is in almost every one of them. I really felt like God wanted to teach this Enneagram 3 achiever what it meant to be steadfast through failure and difficulties. My husband said, “I think that’s true, but I think He also wants to show you what it looks like in Him first.” That was a good word. I stopped focusing on creating steadfastness within myself and looked at the ways God shows His steadfast love and desired to imitate it in my own life.
One way is to share. God doesn’t conceal His love from us. If you seek Him, you’ll find Him. (Jeremiah 29:13) He doesn’t hide from His kids. I asked myself this question just the other day: do your teammates know that you love them? Like are they confident no brainer without a doubt oh yes Janie loves me. Because that’s how I know God feels about me and that’s how confident I want them to be as well. And not only do I want them to be confident that I love them, but I want them to be confident that God loves them too. Do I share the ways God has loved me, fought for me, endlessly brought me back home?
Matthew Henry says that in the way David penned “I have not concealed…from the great congregation” in Psalm 40:10, it shows that there is a temptation to do exactly that. There is a temptation to hide and conceal it because of the cost to proclaim it. However, when I look at the cost of Jesus’ own life to give me freedom and eternal life and when I look at the book of Acts and the apostles that were martyred for the sake of the Truth of the gospel — I’m humbled. What cost could be as great as these here in America? Had they not risked their lives to share the Truth our eyes may have never seen, our ears may have never heard, and our lips may have never tasted the sweet joy of that steadfast love.