Frederick Buechner, writing in A Crazy, Holy Grace about our other kind of salvation — one, I think, depressed people often relate to very much on a day-to-day, or usually, a sleepless-night to sleepless-night basis.
The text is I Chronicles 16, the man is King David, and he is urging us to “tell of his salvation from day to day.”
Buechner:
“His song continues nonetheless and continued all his life…. every day, as David remembered, he had been somehow saved — saved enough to survive his own darkness and lostness and folly, saved enough to go on through thick and thin to the next day and the next day’s saving and the next.
‘Remember the wonders he wrought, the judgments he uttered,’ David cries out in his song, and the place where he remembers these wonders and judgments is his own past in all its brokenness and the past of his people before him.”
Think about that — “the next day’s saving.”
He will save us tomorrow, and the next, and even when we pass away, that’s when his saving is strongest.
And it will happen — but passing away is really more of a “passing into.”
Passing into what? Passing into Jeremiah 31’s scene:
“Tears of joy will stream down their faces, and I will lead them home with great care. They will walk beside quiet streams and on smooth paths where they will not stumble. For I am Israel’s father, and Ephraim is my oldest child.”
So in reality, we can and should always talk about the “next day’s saving,” because Christ never loses his sheep. It’s our hope, sometimes very weak and fading, yes, but his promise. And thank God his promise always outlasts our hope.
