Emotional Meditation—By Micah Siemens
There’s a quiet kind of courage in waiting—real waiting. Not the passive kind where you stare at the clock, but the soul-deep waiting where you’re holding onto God with white knuckles because you’ve got nothing else left to cling to. That’s where this psalm opens.
“I waited patiently for the Lord…”
The Hebrew hints at something more like “I waited and waited.” There’s repetition built into the bones of the line—almost like David is saying:
“I kept waiting even when waiting felt like breaking.”
And honestly, that hits home. Because waiting on God rarely feels poetic while you’re in it. It feels slow. Stretching. Sometimes humiliating. Like you’re stuck in a holding pattern while everyone else is moving forward. But then David says something surprising:
“He inclined to me and heard my cry.”
There’s tenderness in that. The image isn’t of a distant king dispatching help—it’s of God bending down, leaning in, listening closely to the trembling voice of someone who feels trapped. And then comes the rescue:
“He brought me up out of a pit of destruction, out of the miry clay.”
That line has a way of finding the places in your soul that still feel stuck. The pits we fall into don’t always look dramatic. Sometimes they’re made of disappointment, or shame, or loneliness, or a fear you haven’t been able to shake. Sometimes the “miry clay” is the sense that you should be further along by now—but you’re not. But David isn’t celebrating his own strength. He’s celebrating the God who lifts. The God who reaches deeper than you can climb. The God who wipes the mud off your face without embarrassment. And then comes one of the most beautiful lines in the psalms:
“He put a new song in my mouth…”
Not the old song of worry. Not the tired song of fear. Not the familiar song of “here we go again.” But a new song—born not from circumstances changing, but from God intervening. It’s the music that rises when grace touches a life that thought it was finished. I love the way verse 5 closes this moment:
“Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders You have done… they are too numerous to count.” It’s almost like David gets overwhelmed by gratitude mid-sentence. He can’t even finish the list. He realizes he is standing in a story far bigger than his pain—and far richer than the pit he crawled out of. And I feel that too sometimes. You look back and realize God has been writing wonders behind your back. He has been weaving things you didn’t notice at the time. He has been lifting you, even when you only felt the ache. This is where Psalm 40 begins—not with triumph, not with certainty, but with the memory of a God who shows up in muddy places, listens to weary prayers, and pulls you out inch by inch until you can breathe again. And that memory becomes the anchor for everything that follows.
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