If you love someone, you are “quick-eyed” with them.27 You watch intently for the merest facial expression or gesture or tone of voice that hints at a need, so that you can meet it. Wonderfully, God loves us like that, his all-seeing eyes alert to both what threatens us and what nurtures us (verse 19). The psalm ends on a note of hope, but this is not a general optimism. The psalmist does not hope in God giving him this or that. He waits in hope for the Lord himself. He is focused “not on the gift (though there is a place for this: Romans 8:18–25) but on the Giver. Such hope will ‘never
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