The Lord Is My Helper
John 5:7 · Hebrews 13:6 (NIV)
A crab pot is a wire cage. On the Chesapeake Bay, watermen, the men and women who make their living crabbing and fishing there, drop the pots into the water and come back later to pull them up. Sometimes a pot breaks loose or is left behind. Then it becomes what people call a ghost trap.
Left untended, a ghost trap sits on the bottom and goes on catching. Lauren Hines-Acosta, an environmental reporter, described what happens to the crabs and other animals that crawl inside. "So they just die really for no reason," she said in a Bay Journal interview with Delmarva Public Media.
The news digest 1440 shared this story this morning, linking to Good Good Good's report from last week. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science leads the nationwide TRAP program. Its September report says the program recovered more than 24,000 abandoned traps in two years, weighing almost 600,000 pounds, and documented nearly 36,000 trapped animals. Those are totals across the national program, not just the Chesapeake Bay.
The latest funding includes $225,000 for two projects in Maryland that will work with local watermen to remove abandoned blue crab pots. The program is supported by NOAA, the federal agency that studies the oceans and the weather. Hines-Acosta explained that the watermen know the gear and are often on the water, so they can help locate and remove it.
The people who know what a trap looks like are being asked to help pull it up.
The Gospel of John, one of the four accounts of the life of JESUS, tells about a man beside a pool in Jerusalem called Bethesda. "One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years" (John 5:5). "When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, 'Do you want to get well?'" (John 5:6).
The man explained his difficulty. "Sir," he said, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me" (John 5:7).
Thirty-eight years of illness. Now, at the pool, no one to help him in.
JESUS healed him that day. "At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked" (John 5:9). Then John adds a surprising detail. "The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there" (John 5:13). He was made well before he even knew the name of the One who helped him.
A worship leader named Asaph wrote Psalm 73 about a different kind of trap. He envied people who seemed to have no struggles, and it nearly took him down. "But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold" (Psalm 73:2). He admits he became bitter. His perspective changes when he enters GOD's sanctuary. Looking back, he writes, "Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand" (Psalm 73:23). Even in his bitterness, GOD had not let him go.
Another psalm sings about the day a trap gave way. "We have escaped like a bird from the fowler's snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped" (Psalm 124:7). A fowler is a bird catcher. The psalm gives GOD the credit for the broken snare.
A bishop named Irenaeus led the church in Lyon, in what is now France, around AD 180. At the opening of the fourth part of his work Against Heresies, he used a healing analogy to explain why he needed to understand the teachings he was challenging. He wrote that "it is impossible for any one to heal the sick, if he has no knowledge of the disease of the patients" (Against Heresies IV, Preface 2). In the same pages, he described people as "moulded by His hands, that is, by the Son and Holy Spirit" (IV, Preface 4). The hands that made us know exactly where we are caught.
The Letter to the Hebrews, written to early followers of JESUS who were under pressure, gives us words to carry into our own loneliness. GOD has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." Then the writer adds, "So we say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?'" (Hebrews 13:5-6).
Some of us have been stuck a long time in something that goes on catching us. It may be a habit, an old hurt, or a thought that returns every night. It may feel like no one is coming. GOD knows what the trap looks like. HE comes to the place where we are caught, and HE holds on while we are still inside it.
It leaves me thinking about the people I know who have waited a long time for someone to help.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
🙏 To the one who has been stuck for years, JESUS sees how long it has been.
🙏 To the one who feels there is no one to help, the Lord is your helper.
🙏 To the one caught in envy or bitterness, GOD holds you by your right hand.
🙏 To the ones who pull up what others left behind, GOD sees your quiet work.
Grace and Peace.