Daily Thought for Saturday 5th April 2025
“And now, O Lord, what do I wait for?
My hope is in you.”
Psalm 39:7 (NRSV)
Spaghetti
Robin Hill
When I was growing up food was a whole lot less exotic than it often is today. The regular diet of meat and two veg regularly meant mince, potatoes and peas (or maybe the occasional carrot). Rice was for afters – and certainly not for that fabled dish of far distant shores, curry … whatever that might have been. As for pasta, this meant good old Scottish macaroni made by a reassuringly local producer named Mr Marshall.
But every once in a while Mum would make a meat sauce and serve it up on a refreshingly alien substance: spaghetti imported all the way from Italy in a dark blue paper package. Like long, thin worms of intrigue, these noodles would coil around the surface of the plate (that’s a plate, mind, never a bowl) enticing us into the happy prospect of an illicit slurp as seen on screen in Lady and the Tramp. Spaghetti was fun to eat, although it was always something of a struggle to deal with.
The struggles of spaghetti consumption are, however, as nothing compared with the struggles of life, with one intractable issue coiling into a thorny problem, surrounded by an obstinate anxiety and topped off with a troubling fear. Sometimes life can seem like one huge unruly spaghetti bowl of problems – too much to tackle all at once (and no doubt causing indigestion were you to try).
The writer of Psalm 39 knows this spaghetti bowl of life only too well. Crying to God for help at a time of direst need, he yearns to be heard in his desolate loneliness; to be helped in all the adversity which has come his way. Death seems to be drawing near, with life little more than a joyless thing of futility.
As is the case with so many of the Psalms, the message here is one which human beings of this and every age might well relate to from their own experience. And as we contemplate the foot-sore Jesus on his trek to Jerusalem and the Cross of Calvary, we might pause to reflect on the heartache which will come his way all too soon. Jesus knows our human predicament from the inside out because in the Incarnation God appears on the scene as one of us, never immune to pain or fear, betrayal or death.
Are we alone in the struggles of this, our earthly journey? With Jesus – “the man of sorrows” – by our side, assuredly we are not. And that should give us cause for hope.
Shall we pray?:
Turn us and take us, Lord God, along ways that are for us … wherever those ways may lead. Only let us walk that road in the company of your Son. Amen.