Long furrows

Psalm 129 is one of those psalms that I usually don’t care much for – asking God to smite those who oppose us. But somehow this morning the imagery in that psalm caught my imagination:
“Those who plough ploughed on my back; they made their furrows long.”
It sometimes does feel like people are ploughing on my back – irritating, aggravating, spiteful, unnecessarily difficult or recalcitrant. But maybe, after they have ploughed their long furrows, something good or fruitful can grow from those furrows. Maybe their oppositional or acrimonious actions can, in some way, bear some fruit. That will have to be God’s doing.
“Let them be like the grass on housetops that withers before it grows up”
Well, if you don’t clean out your gutters, pretty soon grass (and plants and trees) are thriving there – but I don’t suppose gutters were an issue for the psalmist. May evil wither before it grows up. May our lives be inhospitable to evil and injustice. May we create a world of rooftops, where evil can establish no roots.