Has God withheld good?

In Psalm 84 the writer insists (v.10), “No good thing does [God] withhold from those who walk uprightly.” Yet, even though we’re working hard to walk uprightly, we sometimes find ourselves in situations or circumstances that are very far from anything we would have chosen:

• Maybe we’re not in the relationship our heart cries out for.

• Maybe we’re in the relationship of our choosing, but it hasn’t turned out the way we’d expected or hoped.

• Maybe our career has taken an unexpected and disappointing turn, or things have bottomed out professionally.

• Maybe we don’t have the health we used to take for granted, and the future we face looks so much more limited and frustrating than the one we’d mapped out for ourselves.

• Maybe “peace like a river” simply doesn't attend our way anymore.

• Or maybe God has gone silent on us; that sense of his presence and love—the sense of his face shining on us—the joy that once seemed so real has evaporated and left us with the sense, rather, that God has withheld—or is withholding—good from us..

Whatever it may be, we sometimes find ourselves where we don’t want to be.

That was also true for the writer of this week’s Psalm. He longs to be in Jerusalem, and for whatever reason isn’t. His soul has a longing and desire for the courts of the Lord. His heart and his flesh cry out for the living God. He yearns to be part of the worshipping life of the Temple. But he is, for reasons we don’t know, very far from where he wants to be, and he looks longingly for what he does not, or cannot have.

So what does he do about it? And what might we learn from the Psalmist about how we might respond to similar situations or circumstances?