Back to the psalms, here are some highlights from Psalm 36.

I memorized this paragraph decades ago:

Your mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the great mountains; Your judgments are a great deep; O LORD, You preserve man and beast. (Psalm 36.5, 6, NKJV)

It’s a good source of praise. Our late pastor Dave Jordan-Irwin loved this passage in The Message and read it to us from time to time:

God’s love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness nothing gets lost; Not a man, not a mouse, slips through the cracks. (Psalm 36.5, 6, MSG)

Wow: meteoric, astronomic, titanic, oceanic…yet not a man, not a mouse slips through the cracks!

Here’s another highlight:

How precious is Your lovingkindness, O God! Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of Your wings. They are abundantly satisfied with the fullness of Your house, And You give them drink from the river of Your pleasures. For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light we see light. (Psalm 36.7 – 9, NKJV)

“Abundantly satisfied with the fullness of your house” – our recently acquired dog, Benji, is a picture of that. A rescue dog, two months in an animal shelter. Now he’s abundantly satisfied with the fullness of this house. I’m a rescue dog, too:

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus… (Ephesians 2.1 – 7, NKJV)

Worse than a rescue dog. Dead. Now alive, sitting with Jesus, just as my dog is sitting with me as I write.