January: New Beginnings
Day 6 — 6 January
The Song That Starts in the Dark
Scripture: “I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.” — Psalm 40:1–3 (KJV)
Short Teaching
You would think the song would come after the rescue. First you get out of the pit, then you recover, then eventually, once you have put enough distance between yourself and the darkness, you find something to sing about. That is how we expect it to work. First relief, then gratitude, then music. A logical progression from suffering to celebration.
But David does not tell the story that way. Read his sequence carefully. The song does not arrive once he has moved on from the pit and put his life back together. The song is born directly out of the pit. It comes saturated with the memory of the clay, the waiting, the crying out. It is not a celebration that replaces the suffering. It is a celebration that could not have existed without it. And that, if you sit with it long enough, turns everything you thought you knew about new beginnings on its head.
In August 2010, thirty-three miners were trapped seven hundred metres underground in the San José copper mine in northern Chile. A rockfall had sealed the main access tunnel. For seventeen days, the world did not know whether they were alive or dead. When a drill probe finally broke through to the chamber where the men were sheltering, a note came back attached to the bit: Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33. “We are fine in the shelter, all 33 of us.” It took another fifty-two days to drill a rescue shaft wide enough to bring them out. Sixty-nine days underground. More than two months of darkness, rationed food, and the grinding uncertainty of whether the plan to reach them would actually work.
When the first miner, Florencio Ávalos, emerged from the rescue capsule at the surface, the footage showed something remarkable. He did not collapse. He did not run. He dropped to his knees and embraced his son, and then he looked up. Reporters asked the miners, in the days and weeks that followed, what the experience had been like. Many of them said the same thing in different words: they were not the same people who had gone into that mine. Something had changed in the dark. Not the kind of change you choose, but the kind that happens to you when everything you relied on is stripped away and you discover what is actually holding you up.
David would have understood. He was not writing from a literal mine shaft, but the language he used tells you he was writing from somewhere just as suffocating and just as inescapable by human effort.
The psalm opens with a single Hebrew word that most English translations struggle to convey in full. “I waited patiently” translates the construction qavoh qivvithi (קַוֹּה קִוִּיתִי), an intensified form of the verb qavah (קָוָה, meaning “to wait,” “to hope,” or “to look eagerly for”). The doubling of the verb in Hebrew is a way of expressing intensity. This is not casual, foot-tapping, glancing-at-the-clock waiting. This is waiting that has settled in for the long haul. Waiting that has run out of alternatives. Waiting that has exhausted every human strategy and has nothing left to do but remain, face forward, in the direction of the One it is waiting for. Qavah is sometimes translated “hope” elsewhere in the Old Testament, and that is no accident. In Hebrew thought, waiting and hoping are not two separate activities. To wait for God is to hope in God. To hope in God is to remain oriented toward Him when every other support has been pulled away.
This is what David was doing. Not passively sitting. Not giving up. Actively holding his position, facing toward God, in the middle of something he could not fix, could not climb out of, and could not shorten by his own effort.
And what was he waiting in? The psalm names it: bor shaon (בּוֹר שָׁאוֹן), translated “an horrible pit.” The word bor (בּוֹר, meaning “pit,” “cistern,” or “dungeon”) describes a deep, narrow hole, often cut into rock, used for water storage or as a prison. The word shaon (שָׁאוֹן, meaning “roaring,” “tumult,” or “destruction”) adds the quality of chaos and noise. This is not a quiet pit. This is a pit of tumult, of roaring confusion, of disorientation so thick you cannot tell which way is up. Alongside it, David names tiyt hayaven (טִיט הַיָּוֵן, meaning “miry clay” or “swampy mud”), the kind of ground that swallows your feet the moment you try to stand. Every attempt to gain traction only sinks you deeper. Every effort to climb pulls you further down.
If you have ever been stuck in a season like that, you know exactly what David is describing, even if your pit was not made of rock and mud. It might have been a marriage that was dissolving no matter what you did. A depression that would not lift despite every remedy you threw at it. A financial hole that seemed to deepen with every payment. A season of life where you felt yourself sinking and could not find anything solid to push against. That is tiyt hayaven. That is the miry clay. And the most maddening thing about it is not the depth. It is the futility. You are not idle. You are fighting. You are working. And the ground will not hold.
Now, look at what happens next. “He inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” The word “inclined” is natah (נָטָה, meaning “to stretch out,” “to extend,” or “to bend toward”). In English, this sounds as though God physically leaned down from a distant position, the way you might bend down to help a child who has fallen. But we know from the consistent witness of Scripture that God does not occupy a spatial location above us from which He needs to bend. He is not distant. He is Spirit, fully present everywhere, closer to David in that pit than the mud clinging to his skin. So what is natah describing? It is describing David’s experience. From where David was standing, waist-deep in clay, looking upward because there was nowhere else to look, the encounter with God felt like someone bending toward him. The language captures the intimacy of the moment from the human vantage point. David experienced God’s constant presence as personal attentiveness, and he used the most vivid word he could find to convey what that felt like. God did not relocate. David, in his waiting, in his qavah, had turned so fully toward the One who had always been present that he experienced the closeness he had not previously been positioned to feel.
And then comes the rescue. “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.” Again, the language is Anthropomorphism, human imagery for divine activity. God does not have hands that reach into pits and pull people out physically. But notice the contrast David is painting. He moves from tiyt hayaven, ground that will not hold, to sela (סֶלַע, meaning “rock,” “cliff,” or “crag”), ground that will not give way. Sela in the Old Testament does not describe a pebble or a loose stone. It describes immovable bedrock, the kind of rock you could build a fortress on and never worry about the foundation shifting. David’s feet, which had been sinking in clay that offered no resistance, are now standing on something that cannot be moved.
What is the rock? David does not name it explicitly here, but the whole of Scripture points in the same direction. The rock is the unchanging character of God Himself. It is the nature that does not shift, does not soften underfoot, does not give way when pressure is applied. Every other surface David had stood on had eventually turned to mud. His own strength had turned to mud. His circumstances had turned to mud. His plans, his strategies, his best efforts, all mud. But the character of God was sela. It was bedrock before David was born. It was bedrock during the pit. It is bedrock now. Not because God decided to become firm at the moment David needed firmness, but because firmness is simply what He is and has always been.
And then, the part that makes this psalm unlike anything else David ever wrote. “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God.” After the waiting, after the pit, after the mud and the crying out and the long, uncertain dark, what emerges is not merely relief. It is music. A shir chadash (שִׁיר חָדָשׁ, meaning “a new song,” “a fresh song”), language that describes something that has never been sung before, a song that could only have been composed by someone who has been where David has been and has come out standing on rock instead of sinking in clay.
This is what makes the psalm so extraordinary, and it is what I most want you to hear today. The song did not come instead of the pit. It came through the pit. David did not skip from comfortable life to worship. He moved from sinking to waiting, from waiting to encounter, from encounter to solid ground, and from solid ground to a song that had never existed before because it could only have been born in someone who had experienced that precise sequence. The pit was not wasted. The waiting was not empty. The crying out was not unheard. Every stage of the journey contributed something irreplaceable to the music that came out the other end.
And notice what the song produces. “Many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.” David’s new song does not stay private. It becomes visible to others. People watch someone emerge from a pit with a song they have never heard before, and something stirs in them. Not envy. Not mere admiration. Trust. They see what God’s constancy looks like when it meets a human being who has run out of everything except the willingness to remain oriented toward Him, and they begin to believe it might be true for them as well.
This is how new beginnings actually work, more often than we would like to admit. They do not start with the music. They start with the mud. They start in the season you would most like to skip, the season of sinking, of futility, of waiting without a guaranteed timeline. And the new song, the genuinely new thing that could not have existed before, is not composed in comfort. It is composed in the transition from clay to rock, from self-sufficiency to dependence, from facing in every direction at once to facing steadily toward the One whose presence never left the pit because He was never absent from it in the first place.
If you are in the pit right now, six days into a year that already feels like it is sinking, I am not going to tell you to cheer up. I am not going to tell you the pit does not matter or that the mud is not real. It is real. You can feel it pulling at you. But I am going to tell you this: the pit is not the end of the story, and it is not a waste. The God whose character is sela, bedrock that has never shifted, is as present with you in the miry clay as He will be when your feet find solid ground. He has not withdrawn. He has not wandered off to attend to someone more deserving. He is there, fully, and your qavah, your waiting, your stubborn orientation toward Him even when you cannot feel the bottom, is not pointless. It is the posture from which the new song is born.
You cannot sing it yet. That is fine. The song is not your job right now. Your job right now is to keep facing the direction you are facing, to remain oriented toward the One who has always been present, and to trust that the rock beneath the mud is real even though your feet have not touched it yet.
The miners in Chile could not see the rescue shaft being drilled above them. For weeks, all they had was a promise that it was coming and the sound of machinery somewhere in the rock overhead. They waited. They held position. And when the capsule finally arrived, they did not emerge empty-handed. They emerged as men who had discovered something about what holds you up when every other support has been stripped away.
David emerged the same way. And so will you.
The song is coming. It starts in the dark.
Declaration
This is not the pit where my story ends. This is the pit where my song begins. I am standing in the clay, and I will not pretend it is not pulling at me, but I am facing toward the One whose presence has never left this place, because there is no place it has ever left. I wait, not passively, but with the kind of hope that holds its ground when there is no ground to hold. My feet have not yet found the rock, but the rock has not moved. It has not shifted. It was bedrock before I entered this season, and it will be bedrock when I emerge from it. I do not need to manufacture my own rescue. I do not need to claw my way out with cleverness or grit. What I need is to remain oriented, face forward, eyes fixed, toward the God whose character is the only surface in this universe that has never given way beneath the weight of anyone who stood on it. The song is not here yet. But it is forming. I can feel the first notes gathering in a place deeper than the mud. And when it comes, it will be new, genuinely new, because it will have been composed in the one place where nothing but God’s constancy could sustain it. I am not rescued yet. But I am not abandoned. And that, today, is enough to keep me facing forward.
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