Better felt than telt
James Cathcart
August 05, 2026
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Listen to this daily worship
Psalm 145: 8-9, 14-21 (NIV-UK)
8
The Lord is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.9
The Lord is good to all;
he has compassion on all he has made.
14
The Lord upholds all who fall
and lifts up all who are bowed down.15
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food at the proper time.16
You open your hand
and satisfy the desires of every living thing.17
The Lord is righteous in all his ways
and faithful in all he does.18
The Lord is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.19
He fulfils the desires of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and saves them.20
The Lord watches over all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy.21
My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord.
Let every creature praise his holy name
for ever and ever.
As we say on occasion in Scotland: some things are better felt than telt. There’s an enormous gulf between being told about something and being helped to feel it. ‘Show don’t tell’ as writing students are often told, create a space where people can see for themselves. The pressing question of humanity is not ‘What?’, it’s ‘Why?’
This psalm doesn’t want to tell us about the nature of God, it wants us to feel it. How do you describe the indescribable — by starting with the describable. By using words to create pictures that can hold something more than words
Prayer:
God you held me
when I leant on the soft sunbaked sandstone
somewhere to lay my head.
God I recognised you,
in oil on canvass,
through a father’s arms laid on his son’s shoulders.
God I heard your breath in the echoing footsteps of the faithful
an easy ‘rush-rush' noise
punctuated by shutter clicks.
I saw you sitting in a garden,
it was a painting of a gardener
who wasn’t you
but could have been
a gardener
content to see life growing
to be amongst it
to be near.
Amen.
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