A few years back, Linda, Chelsea, and I went on a fall hunting expedition up to the Peace River country in northeastern British Columbia. Each morning I was up at 3 a.m. and out of camp to meet up with my friend Harold, my hunting partner. Harold and I would spend the whole day blissfully nosing around the Peace Country for moose. Linda and Chelsea slept till about eight and then they would get up and grind away on home schooling until I got back after dark to eat supper, which was also cooked by the girls. I was having loads of fun. They were holed up in camp, working their tails off. They didn’t even have the truck to get them out of the bush if they wanted a break during the long day.
On the third day, about five minutes after I joyfully left the campsite, Linda heard a little “plink … plink.” Lying there in her warm cocoon of eiderdown and blissfully half asleep, she wondered what it was. Somehow in her semiconscious state, she remembered me saying the night before that the propane tank was getting real low. It suddenly dawned on her that the propane tank had just run out. The fridge and furnace had just plinked their little safety shutoff devices. Linda knew that to keep the fridge cold and the trailer warm she would have to unscrew the hose from the empty propane tank and screw it on the full one and then re-light the pilot lights. The problem was, she had never done it before.
Muttering unpublishable niceties about her husband, Linda climbed out of bed, slipped her ducky boots on her bare tootsies and armed herself with a 14-inch crescent wrench. She went out to the front of the trailer, ripped off the tank cover,
latched onto the brass hose nut with the crescent wrench and commenced twisting. It wouldn’t budge. She heaved again on the nut; it wouldn’t budge. She heaved some more; it wouldn’t budge. More heaving, more no-budging got the back of an axe involved. Bash, bash on the end of the crescent wrench; it wouldn’t budge. “Ooooh, that husband of mine!” Bash, bash, bash, bash; and the crescent wrench did exactly what crescent wrenches were designed for—it mutilated the brass nut and slipped with a clatter to the frosty ground, after cushioning its fall on Linda’s feet.
“Why hadn’t I been there instead of gallivanting after swamp donkeys at three in the morning with friend Harold?” Linda said when I got home for supper after dark. “And why, why, why, did I always have to tighten every nut until it twisted off or cross-threaded?” Linda said, scowling at me as she cross-examined me.
“Oh!” I said. “Didn’t you know that propane threads go the opposite way to all other threads. I didn’t overtighten the nut, you were just tightening it yourself when you thought you were loosening it. You were twisting your nut the wrong way,” I
said in a calm and quiet voice.
Somehow I made it through dinner. But I couldn’t sleep. My mind got all tangled up with Linda’s experience and a psalm I had been thinking on.
Psalm 121 seemed to me to be all about twisting nuts the wrong way; not propane tank nuts, but life’s nuts. I knew the opening stanza so well: “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?”
The psalmist’s question now seemed to me to be a compelling one, yet I had often glossed over it. When I am hard pressed, where will my help come from, or perhaps better put, where will I turn to? I knew that in the context of the psalm, the hills or high places were where the pop religions of the day were practiced, the Baal cult of the Canaanite culture. On the hills altars for child sacrifice were set up to appease the nature deity Baal. On the hills sacred poles or trees were planted to the mother goddess Asherah. On the hills sacred prostitutes were provided to lure the help of the goddess of fertility Ashtereth. When times got tough it was a real temptation to look to the hills, to the pop religion of the culture in which Israel lived.
For me, when life suddenly takes a troubling twist, I cast around crying out for help, help from anywhere. I often catch myself looking to the hills of my culture. and that’s when I commence twisting on life’s nut the wrong way. That’s what Psalm 121 confronts me with. It grabs me by the chin and stares me in the eye and says: “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” My help won’t come from the hills, from the many pop religions of my culture. Jeremiah got it right … the hills are a delusion. (Jeremiah 3:23)
Eugene Peterson names the hills today clearly in his comments on Psalm 121 in, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. there is no help from nature worship or from stargazing. There is no help from crystals or dream catchers. There is no help from the latest fads of mind or body or spirit. There is no help from the hills and all of their patent medicine religions and New age faith. There is no help from the huckster religions of talk show host and dear abby column; the huckster religions of self-hypnosis and metaphysical philosophy; the huckster religions of megavitamin and miracle herb; the huckster religions of mind over matter, and the escapism of lottery tickets and of substance abuse and of promised demon-slayer tv preachers.
The psalmist provides the corrective: “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
