One minute you are well and happy and making plans for the future; the next minute the entire world is disarranged by a catastrophe. The psalmist is not a person talking about the good life, how God has kept him out of all difficulty. This person has gone through the worst—the dragon’s mouth, the flood’s torrent—and finds himself intact. He was not abandoned but helped. The final strength is not in the dragon or in the flood but in God who “didn’t go off and leave us.”
