Have you ever felt like a hamster on a wheel you didn’t volunteer to get on?
You’re tired, you’d really love to step off for a while, but circumstances just keep coming. As soon as one thing gets dealt with, another one shows up like it had been waiting its turn.
After reading David’s story in 1 Samuel several times, it’s pretty evident to me that he knew that feeling too.
Psalm 34 came out of one of those seasons in David’s life when everything seemed to be happening at once. His life reminds me of a dodgeball game, as he constantly had to stay on the alert, never knowing where the next hit was coming from.
David was mainly on the run from King Saul, who was trying to kill him, and at one point he went to a Hebrew priest looking for food and was given bread that had been set apart for the Lord. Then, because apparently fleeing for your life requires more than a few loaves of bread, David asked if there happened to be a weapon around that he could use.
As it turned out, there was.
Wrapped in cloth nearby was the sword of Goliath, the very giant David himself had killed.
I mean, how’s that for a reminder of God’s past faithfulness right when it feels like there is no safe place to even rest and no time to strategize your next move?
David grabbed the sword and kept running, this time heading to King Achish of Gath. But before he could catch his breath, he realized Achish’s servants knew exactly who he was.
They even knew the hit song about him: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands,” which was probably the last thing David wanted anyone in that room to bring up.
David became afraid that Achish would see him as a threat and kill him, so in what feels like a very desperate, very human escape plan, he pretended to be insane.
And somehow, it worked.
Achish wanted nothing to do with him and sent him away, which meant David was back on the run once again.
Honestly, by this point, I think I would have wanted to yell, “Can I please just have five minutes to gather my thoughts?”
David had been running for his life. His future was uncertain, Saul wanted him dead, and now he had narrowly escaped another king.
Yet somewhere in the middle of all that fear and uncertainty, David had learned something about God that he later put into words:
“The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and rescues them.” — Psalm 34:7
I love that word encamps because it feels so steady.
It doesn’t give me the picture of God occasionally dropping by to see whether I’m still hanging in there. An encampment settles in, surrounds, and stays.
We often forget that the heroes in our Bible were real people, with real emotions, and real trauma. David had been on the run for years, and fear had more than one occasion to creep in. Psalm 34 actually says so, but David didn’t allow fear to cripple him.
Looking back, David chose to focus on this truth: even when he was on the run, God was with him, and while circumstances looked chaotic, he had not been abandoned.
Thousands of years later, Paul echoes the same sentiment in the midst of his own hardship in 2 Corinthians 4:8–9: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”
Sometimes my circumstances feel a lot like that hamster wheel too. I’m tired, things keep coming, and there doesn’t seem to be a good place to get off, even for a moment.
That’s why Psalm 34:7 feels like such a gift to me. It reminds me that I’m not just spinning my wheels. I am making progress, even though I can’t yet see it.
God is present right in the middle of circumstances I cannot immediately change. Thank God that His protection and His strategies aren’t dependent on my ability to hold everything together. Even when I can’t see what He is doing, I can trust that He has not left me exposed or on my own.
So when it seems like life won’t give us a breather, we can rest in this assurance. We can breathe in Him and have space to move (Acts 17:28). The God who surrounds us has not gone anywhere and never will.
©2026 Katherine Walden
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