Kyle Dresback

Friends,

As I get older, I’m learning to appreciate old things. This is especially true of old books. 

I’ve discovered a foreign yet familiar wisdom from authors long dead who lived in other cultures and who spent a lifetime reflecting on what it means to be human. I can sometimes see their blind spots and they help me to see mine.

G. K. Chesterton referred to reading old books as “the democracy of the dead” and, in his very Chestertonian way, refused to “submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” 

It takes time and effort to live with Austen or Melville or Augustine but the result of these enduring works is a hard-won wisdom that can both reinforce and also challenge the popular sentiments of the day. 

This is a little how the Psalms feel to me.

Growing up, I never loved reading the Psalms; they felt “old,” poetry wasn’t my thing, and they can be really repetitive. (“You already said that, David” my adolescent mind would complain.) 

But over time the Psalms offer this same hard-won wisdom. They contain a sweep-and-scope-of-life quality that comes through the slow burn of reading and facing hardship and managing ambition and rereading and celebrating milestones and processing failure and reading again.

Reading the Psalms now feels like an act of trust, the way a young mother comes to her own mother with a newfound respect for her experience. 

The Psalms, so to speak, have “lived life.” They know who God is and who we are and they offer a hard-won wisdom for the attentive reader. 

Opening to Psalm 1 today felt like running into an old—albeit at times strange—friend. But the more I return, the more I’m reminded to look for the wisdom in the strangeness that I hadn’t seen before.

In Christ,

—Kyle