The righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all;
Psalm 34:19
Where the Song Came From
The line printed above Psalm 34 tells us when David wrote it, and it's worth reading before the psalm itself. He wrote this after pretending to be insane in front of a foreign king, scratching at the doors of the gate and letting spit run down his beard until they threw him out of the city. The story is in 1 Samuel 21. He was running from Saul, he ran straight into enemy territory, and he got himself out of it by acting like a madman.
So the man writing "the Lord delivers him from them all" had just been delivered in the least dignified way available to him, and that changes what this verse is promising us.
Now read the first half again, because David concedes something before he promises anything. "The righteous person may have many troubles." Not one trouble, and not a hard season with an end date on it, but many. Being right with God was never a way around trouble, and David of all people isn't going to stand there and tell us otherwise.
Then comes the turn, that the Lord delivers him from them all. David has been counting his own troubles, and he's still counting them while he writes, and he says that every single one of them ends with God getting him out.
The verse just before this one belongs with it too. "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." So the rescue in verse 19 is positioned right next to a promise of nearness, which means God gets us out, and God is close to us the whole time we're still in it.
Count the Ones Behind You
Counting the ones behind you is harder than it sounds, because deliverance is easy to miss while it's happening and it rarely shows up looking like a rescue.
It comes as a friend who calls on the day you'd have gone under alone. It comes as a test result that turns out to be treatable after all. It comes as a month when the money worked out and you never did find out exactly how. It comes as a door that closed while you were still pounding on it, the one you thanked God for two years later.
David's own escape looked ridiculous while it was happening. He got out by making a fool of himself in front of a king, and then he sat down and wrote a song about how good God is, and he wasn't the least bit embarrassed by how the rescue came. He counted it.
The writer of Lamentations does this same thing from inside the rubble, which we walked through in Hope in a Book of Complaints. They call the Lord good while everything around them is still on fire, and they can do it because they're remembering.
My encouragement to you is to go back and count yours, and not the ones you're still waiting on. Count the ones behind you, the troubles that are finished now, the ones you've stopped mentioning because they resolved and you moved on. Write three of them down. Most of us can name our current trouble in about a second and can't name last year's deliverance without sitting still for a minute, and that's backwards.
You have many troubles, and David already told you that you would. You also have a God who has gotten you out of every trouble that's behind you, and who is close to you in the one you're standing in today.
Prayer
Jesus, thank you that you don't pretend our troubles away, and that you don't ask us to pretend either. Thank you that you've already brought us through far more than we tend to remember. Help us to count those deliverances, and to let the counting build our trust for whatever we're facing now. Be close to the ones among us who are brokenhearted and crushed in spirit today. Deliver us, Lord, and hold onto us until you do. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.