Psalms 56:3

Six words, and they are in an order most religious advice reverses.

The expected version is: trust God, and then you will not be afraid. Faith first, fear resolved. It sounds right and it produces a quiet misery in anyone who has tried it and still felt afraid, because it makes the fear itself evidence that the faith failed.

David writes the other way round. When I am afraid — as a given, as a recurring condition of his life — I will put my trust in you. Fear is the occasion, not the obstacle. He does not wait to feel steady before he acts.

Note too that it is when, not if. He is not describing an unusual lapse. He assumes fear will come back, and he has a plan for its return rather than a plan for its abolition.

And there is something in the sheer size of the sentence. It is short enough to say when nothing longer is available to you — at three in the morning, or in a corridor outside a room you do not want to enter. Some of the psalms are architecture. This one is a handhold.

The man who wrote it had recently escaped a hostile king by feigning madness in front of him. It is not the prayer of someone whose life had gone smoothly.