The Psalms That Carried Me Through a Hard Season

Last spring I lost my job. It wasn't sudden — the writing was on the wall for months — but when the day finally came it still knocked the wind out of me. I had a mortgage, a kid starting school in the fall, and a whole identity wrapped up in what I did for a living.

I'm not someone who normally turns to scripture in a crisis. I grew up in the church but drifted through my twenties. Coming back to the Bible as an adult has been slow, skeptical, and honestly a little reluctant. But that spring, I didn't know where else to go.

Psalm 46

"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble."

I must have read Psalm 46 forty times. There's a stillness in it — "Be still and know that I am God" — that I needed badly. Not answers. Not a plan. Just an invitation to stop white-knuckling everything for five minutes.

Psalm 23

Everyone knows the 23rd Psalm. But reading it at 2 a.m. when you're genuinely afraid is a different experience than reciting it in a pew. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." That's not a comfortable verse. That's a verse for people in the valley.

Psalm 121

"I lift up my eyes to the hills — where does my help come from?"

I live near the mountains. I started taking walks in the mornings to get out of my own head, and this psalm became a kind of prayer I'd recite on the trail. By the time I got back home I usually felt like I could face the day.

I found a new job in August. But I'm grateful for the spring that drove me back to these pages. Sometimes the hardest seasons leave you with something you couldn't have picked up any other way.