Psalm 69:1-5. "Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck." I am sinking with no foothold in the mire. "I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me." I am weary with crying and my throat is parched. Those who "hate me without cause" are many, and the ones who would destroy me and attack me with lies are mighty. "What I did not steal, must I now restore?" Oh God, you know my weaknesses and sins, the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.

We do get ourselves into trouble, don't we? "I have come into deep waters" acknowledges this. I could have avoided the deep waters, but I let myself get too far in. That is often when we finally wake up and ask for God's help. Then we feel weary with waiting for it, but God does not sweep in with a lifeline and pull us out right away, or else we would just wander right back into the deep waters. We need to learn that we never want to go back there again. That does not mean that God is not coming or is not with us as we feel the waters rising.

The lesson we learned from these times, though, should be to avoid the actual sins that got us here - the ones that God knows, since nothing is hidden from him. Our enemies, and sometimes even our friends (see Job, for example), will often try to tell us what our sins are - they judge us and lie about us. The temptation may be to believe them - to "restore what we have not stolen." But this is not right either - that is a standard ploy of the devil. The opposite of blindly walking into sin is making atonement for sins you have not committed. No, what we need to do when the water is up to our necks is pray, ask God for help, and then truthfully acknowledge what we have done to get in the place we are, if anything (sometimes  our situation is not our fault - see Job again!), and then ignore the haters and patiently and trustingly wait for our God to save us.