The 23rd Psalm

I've been worried sick about both my kids this week: Michael is waiting to hear whether the fliud drained fom his abdomen this week contains cancer cells, and Danny has had serious depression. He spent this weekend detoxing off Ambien, a sleep medicine I've taken in low doses with no ill effect for years. But some people become horribly addicted to it, and take more and more just to sleep. At that point, this perfctly safe medicine becomes a menace. I talked to him three times yesterday and he sounded terrible.
So, I was pretty ready to ask or prayers for both of them in church today, but there near the beginning of the service was the reading of the 23rd Psalm:
"The Lord is My shepherd I shall not want...The first time the 23rd Psalm came up I was worried about his state of mind. He had been through a lot in recent months, and he was depressed. He was out playing cards with friends and he had been drinkibg heavily. He had gotten upset and left the party and one of his friends came by to tell me he was out somewhere. We looked a bit and I went home to wait. I went to read from the first of my two devotionals, and there it was. I picked up my second devotional and there it was again,
As I read it, I knew Michael was the one in the shadow of the valley of death, an I prayed that God's hand would walk him through whatever he was facing.
Late that night, I got a call from the police, who assured me he was fine. He had been about to jump off a high bridge, but he says it was like a hand gripped his shoulder and walked him back from the edge.
He sobered up, got his life together, then went back to school. He had no money or insurance, so he got really crappy treatment. His cancer was stage 3 and. I was sure we would lose him. That's when the psalm came up again.
A few months later, he was being starved to death by doctors who knew he had a complete blockage. They wanted to wait and see whether it would clear itself. When he was down to 105 pounds, they finally performed surgery, and the pathology report showed a few viable cells. They told him he was going to die. That week, the psalm came up three times in my devotional -- sort of God's way of reiterating to me that things would be OK.
So, as I sat down in church today and there was the 23rd Psalm, it reassured me that things will be OK.
Sure enough, Michael was feeling a little better today and so is Danny, and I'm a lot less stressed because I know it's in God's hands.