Psalm 23 begins on a path we would not have chosen for ourselves. God does not always lead us around the valley, but through it. Psalm 38 takes us into the wreckage of our own wandering, walking the long lanes of grief through consequences of choices—our own and others’.

Psalm 1 returns us to the question of the way itself: how do we learn to walk differently? And Psalm 40 ends with God drawing us out of the pit, setting our feet on solid ground, and establishing our steps.

Together, these four psalms trace a difficult walk with God: being led, losing the way, learning it again, and finding our feet set firm.

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Before we get into this episode of the Members Podcast, I want to ask a question. Since starting the second podcast, we’ve done a series on spiritual formation through the lens of the Darkling Psalter; we have paired psalms, one dark, one light, and reflected on the resonances between the two; we have done author’s notes as I go in depth on the meaning of one of the renditions; and we’ve grouped a handful of psalms thematically and listened to them back-to-back.

My question for you is: What have you found helpful, and what would you like more of? One of these categories or something new? I want this podcast to be useful for people who want to go deeper with the Darkling Psalter, and I’m hoping to get some feedback on what would be best for that.

Let me know what you’ve enjoyed the most:

If you have an idea for something that’s not on there, leave it in the comments.

Now on to this week’s episode.

Psalm 19 Walkthrough

Psalm 19 begins with one of the most familiar images in the Psalms: the heavens declaring the glory of God. But what does it actually mean for creation to speak without words?

This episode of the Members Podcast takes a closer look at Psalm 19, with a nerdy detour into the Milky Way, light-years, and what’s really happening when you look up at the night sky.

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The episode begins with Psalms 42 and 43, which almost merge into a single psalm. They share the same refrain and seem to continue the same prayer: a thirsty, restless soul longing for God, asking why he seems so far away, and asking for his help.

Then, in Psalm 46, the instability spreads outward until the whole world seems to be coming apart—mountains falling, waters roaring, nations raging.

Psalm 62 arrives somewhere quieter. The psalmist has learned to wait. Not because the instability has disappeared, but because it has found something that doesn’t move.

So these four psalms move from restlessness and longing, through upheaval, and finally into stillness—from a soul searching for its refuge to a soul learning to rest there.

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For this episode of the Members Podcast, I’m trying something a little different. Instead of reading a new psalm, I’m taking you behind the scenes of my rendition of Psalm 1 and throwing in some commentary to boot.

In the episode, I talk about the recurrent image of the tree of life as it appears in Genesis, the gospels, Revelation, and Psalm 1; why the …

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I’m trying something a bit different for this episode of the Members Podcast. Instead of reading a new psalm, I walk through my rendition of Psalm 18 and explain the poetic and theological choices behind it. It’s part commentary on Psalm 18 and part casual author’s notes.

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Today we’re returning to our series of paired psalms—listening to two together, one leading into the other. This time, Psalm 43 and Psalm 16.

I have given the rendition of Psalm 43 the very long title “It Wasn’t Away from My Wreck That I Found You, but in the Middle of It.” because i felt that line captured the heart of what is happening in the psalm. The psalm comes from a place of confusion, doubt, wrestling, and desperation. It opens with a cascade of hard questions: If you are my refuge, why do I go about mourning? If you are my safety, why am I always in flight? The poet is hounded and hackled, watching fear run like a song through their head — it says: Faith is a fool’s game; faith is razor-bladed.

But there is a shift in the middle. It isn’t that everything suddenly goes right but the lost-ness pivots somehow towards hope through the medium of prayer. It ends with the line: O my soul, why would you come this farTo fall now? Hold your hope aloft. None of this is what it seems.”

On the other hand, the posture of Psalm 16 is that of someone finding refuge inside the shelter of God’s care. It says: You are my God; what other home do I have but where you are? It describes a return of what was lost. In the words of hte rendition: “My old loves all return like birds to eat from my hands.” There is the astonishing discovery of contentment. The lines of my life lead here… I didn’t know joy could run this full.

Read together, these psalms trace a single journey. The rendition of Psalm 43 teaches us how to hold on to hope before we can see it. Psalm 16 remembers what that hope eventually finds.

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In this episode, we are continuing the series pairing psalms—two at a time, read back to back, each pair moving from dark toward light. This time we’ve got Psalm 22 and Psalm 23.

When Jesus quoted the first line Psalm 22 from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He wasn’t just reciting that line only but many scholars understand this as an example of metalepsis, in which the gospel writers are quoting one smaller bit of an Old Testament passage but it should be understood that the entire whole is being referenced. In this case, Psalm 22. That paints a slightly different picture of what it means that Jesus said this from the cross.

In quoting Psalm 22, he wasn’t announcing that God had left him. He was praying the entirety of a psalm he knew by heart. He was using the psalm in the way God’s people have always used the psalms: reciting their poetry in prayer to take heart and to cling to what is true beyond circumstances. Psalm 22 is not a psalm about abandonment, but it is a psalm about suffering. The rendition tries to walk that line. It asks: Why this ridicule? It is more than I can stand. It admits: I may have only one last trust left in me. Yet, it insists: You are here. Higher, holy, throned nonetheless, and there was never a moment when you were somewhere else.

Psalm 23 is both alike and different. Both unfold in the middle of danger, but here the Shepherd walks beside his people. The first begins with a cry of abandonment; the second answers it with the comfort of God’s presence. Even in the midst of danger, one asks, “Where are you?” while the other says, “You are right here.”

Psalm 23 takes place in the valley of the shadow. There are predators on the hills. The flock is menaced but the shepherd is at hand. He has not removed the danger but interposes himself between us and it. The rendition says it this way: Even when I wander at the violet hour. When wolf fears steal in to take a share and howl in the hills. When I meet the shadow falling between the way I wanted and the way I went — I will fear no evil. You are with me.

What these two psalms share is not rescue, but accompaniment. God does not clear the valley of every danger, nor swoop in before we suffer our crosses. He enters them. He walks with us. He hangs alongside us. That is what the cross means. And that is what both of these psalms, read together, are trying to say.

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Over the next several episodes of the members podcast, I’m pairing psalms—two at a time, read back to back. Each pair moves the same direction: from dark toward light. The darker psalm tells the truth about what it’s like when things have gone wrong… when God feels far away. When faith if threadbare. The more hopeful psalm of the pair speaks from somewhere further along on the journey. The consolation they offer isn’t the result of having dodged the suffering, but having gone through it.

My hope is that somewhere in these pairings you hear something that sounds like your own life. We’ll start with Psalms 6 and 30.

Psalm 6 lives entirely inside the darkness and doesn’t try to leave it. It tells the truth of a hard situation just like it is. It says: I haunt from room to room. I’m not going to make it. Why do fears fountain so full, but grace rises slowly, wears disguises? I think that last question is one of the most raw in the whole project. And the rendition doesn’t rush to answer it.

Psalm 30 is written from the other side—not immediately after the darkness, but eventually, by someone who remembers what it was like to be inside the hard season. It says: No night tears can stop the birds and bells of dawn singing every morning. And sorrow tills the soil where supple flowers grow. It reminds us that if God has been our help, to take up whatever song we have and sing it back to him.

Psalm 6 cannot imagine morning. Psalm 30 remembers that morning always came. This distance between those two realities can be large indeed, but there can be comfort in even finding language to name what is difficult, and to remind yourself, in the words of psalm 30 that “God is a harrow, but you can’t shake him. His love lasts the night and all life long.”

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The Spiritual Formation Series

Catch up with the whole series if you missed any episodes.

Formation as Praise (Part 7)

If spiritual formation is about entering more fully into reality and growing as the creatures God has made us to be, then praise is the fitting destination of that work. Praise teaches us to dethrone ourselves, to move our egos out of the center of our lives, and to re-center ourselves on God. So praise is formative. It is the thanks we give back to God, but the gratitude is recursive, bending back on us and shaping us also.

Sometimes praise rises from a quiet heart. Sometimes it rises from a desperate heart, against all odds. But sometimes, as in the rendition of Psalm 47 below, it runs over from a wellspring of joy and awe.

It booms out of us when God answers our needs, when he returns our prayers with resounding provision. In those moments, praise is not restrained. It is transformative. It rings the heart’s bell. It overflows. It overthrows, like “a trumpet blast at last.”

We do not live in that crescendo at every moment. But by the grace of God, we rise there on occasion. And when we do, the words of the rendition of Psalm 47 can help give us words that capture the experience of praise.

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In the journey of growth, we sometimes move forward by learning something new, and sometimes by returning to what has always been true. In the words of T. S. Eliot from his poem Four Quartets:

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

There is something profoundly true about the spiritual journey in that quote. Growth can look like a movement from orientation to disorientation and then to reorientation. That middle step can be a rich step, even though it is stressful as we move into a new paradigm, but it isn’t where we were meant to live.

After seasons of wrestling, fear, and disorientation, in which it can feel like “the rumbling world is clattering down” something settles, and we begin to find our footing again. When we are no longer reacting or grasping for stability, we can stand where God has placed us and begin to see more clearly where he is leading. As the rendition of Psalm 16 says, “The lines of my life lead here. It is enough. I am content.”

Formation, in this sense, is a kind of return: a return to God as our home, to desires brought back into right order, and to the self we were meant to be. It is a reorientation to the shelter God offers, learning again to live within it and to say with honesty:

“What other home do I have but where you are?”

Here is the rendition of Psalm 16 from the Darkling Psalter.

Psalm 16—My old loves all return like birds to eat from my hands.

I came to shelter with you
Like you were the last hiding place left
While the rumbling world clattered down.
You are my God, what other home 
Do I have but where you are?
What other family have I but yours?

Those who sell themselves 
To other gods will find that sorrow 
Billows all around them,
Steals in through the cracks,
And settles in quiet corners.

The Lord is my portion, my lot,
The cup I drink to the dregs.
The lines of my life lead here.
It is enough. I am content.

You teach me the way of life
By walking it with me.
You are always at hand, always before me,
So even when I slip, I won’t fall,
And even when I fall, I rise.

My old loves all return 
Like birds to eat from my hands:
My gentleness, my quiet, the stillness
I spent so long running from, 
Settle around me in circles.

You save me from every pitfall.
You walk me in the path of life.
I didn’t know joy could run this full.

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The Book of Romans tells us to present our bodies to God as a living sacrifice. It calls us not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds.

John Calvin put it this way when he said, “As consulting our self-interest is the pestilence that most effectively leads to our destruction, so the sole haven of salvation is to be wise in nothing and to will nothing through ourselves, but to follow the leading of the Lord alone.”

But that is easier said than done.

The rendition of Psalm 15 below puts forward a portrait of righteousness and goodness as an upward walk to God’s holy mountain. It asks a searching question: who can live with you there? The answer comes in images and vivid states of being. Sabbath rest. A life that blooms with goodness. A person who gives themselves away like a seed—crushed and buried in the ground, only to rise again as grain. One who suffers and is still able to love. One who gives without counting the cost.

Somewhere in the journey of self-denail, a transformation takes hold. Is it possible that in self-denial We might. discover a life greater than the sum of our losses? Could we find a peace as we give ourselves and our wants and needs away that self-sufficiency And self-determination could Not secure. Isn’t this what Jesus meant when He said, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”

I suppose there is a paradox here. The seed grows greater in the dark. The one who is winnowed—kernel crushed and chaff blown—becomes light enough to rise into a new life.

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Formation as Trust (Psalm 27)

If we could only choose one word to point toward the essence of spiritual formation, trust would be a good candidate. Throughout the book of Psalms, the psalmists cry out in their dire straits and place themselves in the hands of the Lord, which is where he wants them to be.

In this sense, trust is formative. It is the placing of ourselves in the hands of God over and over again, that we put ourselves in the way of the experience of his faithfulness. Trust is the difference between theory and practice. Trust is tested when the stakes rise, and yet we allow him to shape, mold, and lead us. It is through the repetition of the words of trust that we come to know he is trustworthy.

In that sense, our challenges become opportunities. When we come to the limits of our strength, we are given the chance to embrace dependence. The instinct of self-reliance is gradually dislodged by the formation of a deeper habit. So sometimes God gives us the grace of facing long odds, since few of us walk into those lessons willingly. As a wise man once admitted, “I never let go of anything that didn’t have claw marks in it.”

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Formation as Surrender (Psalm 51)

Because self-denial sits near the center of the Christian life, formation begins to look less like building something new and more like the slow work of being emptied out. Growth is not always a question of effort, but of duration. It isn’t a question of achievement, but of surrender.

But what does it mean to surrender—to place ourselves in the hands of the one who is, as Scripture says, the author and perfecter of our faith? It is easier said than done. Our egos hold more sway than we want to admit. It often feels easier to justify, manage, and rationalize than to lay our lives down. But eventually—if we are lucky and blessed—self-justification collapses and surrender can begin.

What if we need to loosen our grip rather than tighten it? What if God has been waiting for us to find our weakened, broken selves? What if the life we receive is better than the one we are trying to hold together? As St. Francis is often paraphrased, “God is always trying to give us good things, but our hands are too full to receive them.”

Keep those thoughts in mind as you listen to the rendition of psalm 51 from the darkling psalter.

Psalm 51—If your love is as true as you say, forget the rest.

Lord, relent. I regret
My summer palaces; the violence
I mistook for virtue; the days
I was always elsewhere; the years
I flung down the fidelities
I should have followed home.

If your love is as true as you say,
Forget the rest.

My failures are always with me. 
They are more than I can stand.
I buried them in the garden,
But they only bloomed black roses
That everyone could see.
Grief pools wherever I sit.
It has been years since
I saw a mirror I recognized.

But you, God, are blameless. 
You are never wrong. You never miss.
Your justice hits home.
I can’t stand it. 
I go wrong seven times a day. 
I don’t want to live on the lam,
But fugitive days unroll 
Under my feet nonetheless.
If you are hiding some remedy,
Share it out. If you know the truth,
And have any patience left,
Show me what it looks like
When love takes flesh 
And tarries with us.

Wash me and I
Will be whiter than snow.
I’ll be free. I’ll sing. I’ll bring
All the bones you’ve broken
Back to you to set in place, in peace.
Overthrow my dense, knotted
Conundrum of folly.
Collect each empty renunciation
And count it good.
Don’t leave me to the years I lost.
Hold me by the hand
And walk me somewhere else.

Then, my old loves will return,
Like birds to eat from my hands:
My gentleness, my quiet, the stillness
I spent so long running from.
Then, you’ll dance me down to bones
And raise me back again.
I won’t have to beat my failures, 
Only see them for what they are.
Repentance will run like quicksilver
Over everything I touch.

I tried to bargain with you 
But what you wanted was a broken heart,
So I laid my whole self on the altar
Like it was my bed,
And didn’t think of rising
With my lies intact.

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Growth doesn’t always feel like growth; sometimes it feels like falling apart. Sometimes God brings us to a place where our effort runs out and we can only ask for help.

Doubts begin to rise. The things we once felt certain about don’t necessarily change—but our confidence in them does. As C. S. Lewis once said, “If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards.” In the same way, God sometimes comes to us as a deconstructor—taking things down before building something else in their place.

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Throughout the Bible, people are described with botanical imagery—especially as trees. The human story begins in a garden with two trees: one leading to life, the other to death. Humanity is invited to the first, but chooses the second.

Psalm 1 brings us back into that garden and sets the choice before us again. There are still two ways to live. But now the invitation has deepened. We are not only called to eat from the tree of life—we are called to become it. As the translation of the first Psalm says:

“Like a tree planted by streams of water…”

The tree in this metaphor is you. Here, human life becomes the place where God’s life grows and takes shape. As the word of God works in us over time, something steady and organic begins to take shape—“ring on ring,” as God’s years mark their slow loops in us.

So, the journey of growth begins with being rooted in the right places. Then, as we live, God’s fruit grows in us.

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This episode marks the beginning of a seven-day guided journey through the Darkling Psalter, exploring the slow work of growth and formation.

Spiritual formation does not move in straight lines. It is not a program to complete or a set of steps to master. It is a process—unhasting, yet unresting—by which God shapes a life over time.

It is painful and joyous, and longer than we expect. It is a journey of surrender, rest, and trust, as much as it is one of labor, perseverance, and dying to self.

These episodes are offered as one small means God may use in that work—inviting reflection through the psalm renditions found in the Darkling Psalter.

This series unfolds across seven themes of formation: rootedness, deconstruction, surrender, trust, self-denial, reorientation, and, finally, praise. Each episode includes a psalm rendition, a brief word of context, prompts for reflection, and a closing prayer.

May these lines from Psalm 1 become true for you:

“… I will layer ring on ring
As God’s years mark loops in me.
I’ll listen for the whisper of psalms,
And begin what there is to begin.”

Begin with the first episode: Formation as Rootedness