The Shepherd Who Walks Me Through the Dark Valley

When David was king in Jerusalem,
he chose singers to praise God
in front of God's tent,
with harps and horns and bronze cymbals.
A man named Asaph led them.
(Asaph's job was to crash the cymbals,
which is a very good job if you like noise.)

David gave them his songs,
and the songs went out from the tent into every home.
Farmers hummed them behind the plow.
Mothers sang them over sleepy babies.
Fathers taught them to their sons,
and the sons taught their own children,
until the whole family of Israel
knew this one by heart:

The LORD is my shepherd.
I have everything I need.
He lets me lie down in green fields.
He leads me beside still water.
When I am worn out, he makes me new.
He guides me along the right paths,
because that is the kind of shepherd he is.

David died, and his harp was put away.
His song kept going.

Four hundred years later
came the darkest day in the family's story.
The army of Babylon broke down the walls of Jerusalem,
burned God's house to the ground,
killed many people,
and marched most of the rest far away.

By the rivers of Babylon
the family sat down and cried.
They hung their harps in the willow trees.
Their captors laughed at them.
"Come on, sing us one of your songs from home!"
"How can we sing the LORD's song
so far from home?" they said.

But far from home, in the dark,
these were the words the family needed most:

Even when I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will not be afraid,
for you are with me.
Your rod and your staff
keep me safe.

God had come along with them.
He kept his promise and brought them home,
and they built his house again.
On the day they laid the first stones,
Asaph's great-great-great-great (and many more greats) grandchildren
were there with their cymbals.
(That family had been crashing cymbals
for almost five hundred years.)

They sang that God is good
and his love goes on forever,
which is just how David's song ends:

You set a table for me
while my enemies look on.
You pour oil on my head.
My cup is full and running over.
Your goodness and your love will follow me
every day of my life,
and I will live in the house of the LORD
forever.

But a house of stones does not last forever,
and every singer's voice gave out in the end.
Their grandchildren went on singing
you are with me
to a Shepherd none of them had ever seen,
and hoped for the day he would come close.

Then the Shepherd came close,
born in David's own town.
He walked down into the valley of death himself,
and on the third day he came back up, alive.

An old man named John
was shown where the song was going.
He saw a crowd too big to count,
from every country,
singing in God's house.
In the middle stood a Lamb who had been killed
and was alive again.
"The Lamb will be their shepherd," John was told.
"He will lead them to springs of living water."

By the rivers of Babylon, the family had hung their harps in the trees.
In that crowd they are singing David's song to Jesus,
and not one harp is left hanging.