In contemplating today’s Psalm and anthem, “setting the Lord always before me” is difficult to explain. I have Amanda Cohen to thank for this image; but it’s like an hourglass that seems to have been flipped and steadied. Your average human is “heady,” and is often led by compulsion. And when the hourglass rights itself, stillness leads.

Carl Schalk was a noted Lutheran composer, author, and lecturer. Between 1965 and 2004 he taught church music at Concordia University in Chicago. During this time, he developed the university’s Master of Church Music degree. His music is unassuming, not over the top, but seamless and clean. It’s still, like a smoothed-out lake. This anthem reflects clarity of mind and body, the hourglass idea righting itself.

Some of you may remember the old Mac computers. When “unresponsive,” the cursor would turn into a spinning hourglass. Today, it’s a spinning wheel called a throbber. It means that something is working in the “background,” and the computer’s bandwidth is all eaten up. It’s frustrating. The computer is no good – it’s locked up with worry.

I believe many of us are throbbers ourselves. There’s something running in the background of our minds, which has robbed us of our creative bandwidth. We’re no good. Our hourglass is spinning at night. We consume too much news, social media, and engage in too much useless conversation. We’re unresponsive, locked, and our bandwidth is taken up with futility, rather than creativity, unconditional love, and peace.

But each week, we have an opportunity to notice the hourglass come to a standstill. When that happens, the sand trickles down into the lower part of our bodies and the sandstorm of the mind settles. In those moments of clarity, we see what “setting the Lord before me” means. It means settling from your spinning throbber, whirling wildly as your head hits the pillow at night. In the gaps, when the hourglass frees up bandwidth, you feel moments of bliss. Few experience this on a regular basis. Their creative bandwidth is consumed with fear and the so-called happenings of the world.

This anthem reminds us of how intimate life really is, when we stop spinning. In the word intimate is a clue – the word “mate.” Who is this mate? This might be considered your intuitive gut, your center of being which awakens when you get off your device and into the simpleness of the present moment – nature, silence, stillness. When the hourglass stops spinning, the bandwidth creates a portal, a space that allows the sand to descend into the lower portion of the vessel. This grounds you. It aligns you with the gravitational pull of the spirit, the foundation that keeps you “upright” in a turbulent world.

“The Lord being before me” means that your highness is priority, not the compulsive mind, or your lowness. We call this highness God, but deeply we know high and low are both alike. The depths now lead with subvocalization in the gut, not spinning words in the head. The lower portion of our being leads, rather than the heady, upper portion toppling over with every wave that hits it. That’s the straightforward nature of the spirit, and the spinning hourglass rests in midair. You can hear this “airiness” in the music, the grounding of the spirit. The openness of spiritual bandwidth now leads the way, and the hourglass stands still in the timelessness of the soul. Soli deo Gloria.