Kyle Dresback

Friends,

I was surprised to receive a book in the mail a few weeks back. I hadn’t remembered ordering one. It was Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, and in it was a note from a friend who knew that I had just lost my father and that reading a book about Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call driving a cowherd from Texas to Montana was what I needed.

He was right. The story of these characters will live with me for a long time. Their various ambitions and regrets and the friendships that formed them were somehow clarifying and healing for me, though I am about as far from a Texas cowhand as one can be. 

In the story I received a great gift. 

Likewise, Psalm 1 reflects on the gift of the Torah. And while this Torah certainly includes God’s “law” (rendered in virtually every English translation), I wonder if it might invite us into the Torah in its broader sense—the entire tradition and memory that shaped Israel’s life with and obedience to God. That is, Israel’s story.

In its rehearsal and remembrance, Israel’s story shapes the hopes and imagination of the faithful, and it informs their piety and worship. It’s no accident that we retell a part of this story each Sunday both in our reading and in our liturgy. A reverence for God’s laws is a part of that story, but so is the rest—the tumult of Abraham’s family, the escape through the sea, the tragedy of the monarchy, and the pleas of the prophets.

Nurturing a faithful retelling of that story is a “delight” according to the psalmist. In the retelling and meditation on the story we receive a gift:

Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the Lord’s Torah,
and on his Torah they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

In Christ,

—Kyle