Can My Dust Praise You? - The One Year Book of Psalms

Psalm 30:8-12

8I cried out to you, O LORD.

I begged the Lord for mercy, saying,

9“What will you gain if I die,

if I sink down into the grave?

Can my dust praise you from the grave?

Can it tell the world of your faithfulness?

10Hear me, LORD, and have mercy on me.

Help me, O LORD.”

11You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.

You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,

12that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.

O LORD my God, I will give you thanks forever!

Shortly after hearing of two missionaries martyred in East Africa, Oxford-trained James Hannington resigned his church and volunteered to be a replacement. The year was 1882, less than a decade after David Livingstone had died there.

After arriving in Africa, Hannington was beset with fever after fever and was forced to return to England to recover. A year later Hannington headed back to Africa.

Though it was riskier, he chose the shortest route to the interior. Trekking through Masai country, Hannington survived many threats. Each morning he would repeat his “Traveling Psalm” (Psalm 121) and then continue on his way. But then he was unexpectedly seized, stripped, beaten, and imprisoned in a filthy grass hut. Drunken guards surrounded him. There he read the Psalms and wrote brief notes in his diary.

On the morning of the day he died, Hannington read Psalm 30 and wrote, “If this is the last chapter of my earthly history, then the next will be the first page of the heavenly—with no blots and smudges, and no incoherence.” James Hannington, aged thirty-eight, was murdered October 27, 1885.

England was so stirred by Hannington’s ultimate sacrifice that scores of volunteers enlisted to take his place, and within five years twelve thousand East Africans had become Christians. Truly Hannington’s dust continued to tell the world of God’s faithfulness.

Walk in the light, and e’en the tomb

No fearful shade shall wear.

Glory shall chase away its gloom,

For Christ hath conquered there.

BERNARD BARTON

Bible Networking

Compare Psalm 30:11 with Isaiah 61:10 and see what a wonderful clothier God is.

Notable Quotable

“What is praise? The rent we owe to God. And the larger the farm, the greater the rent should be.”

G. S. BOWES