Devotional Thought for a Rainy Tuesday

Psalm 101:5a Whoever slanders his neighbor secretly I will destroy.

This is the thing about the Psalms that drives me crazy. It was all very well and good for David, who was after all the king of his nation, to say something like this. But when I try and put the same words in my mouth they sound limp and unconvincing. It doesn't come across well when it sounds like I'm assuring God of my intention to deal violently with a category of sinners into which I myself have fallen at times. "Don't worry, Lord, these people who say mean things about their neighbors behind their backs, I'm going to take 'em apart."
And I'm always tempted to think privately that secretly slandering your neighbor is a bad thing, but not something that warrants your destruction.
But if there's a problem here it's not with David or with his Psalm. If I, like David, was truly a man after God's own heart, I might feel David's indignation more keenly, I might share his sense of moral outrage.
One summer when I was staying with my grandparents my grandmother bought a bottle of moxie on a trip to the grocery store. It was unusual for her to buy anything impulsively or anything carbonated, but having grown up in Northern Maine the moxie triggered her nostalgia. Then she popped it open and the moxie cured her nostalgia with its bitter aftertaste. But I was so soft-drink deprived that I was not about to let this opportunity get poured down the drain. I kept sipping that stuff until it was gone and found that as I sipped I lost my initial revulsion and graduated all the way by slight degrees to an acquired taste.
With verses like this one I feel I need to keep them on my lips in much the same way, that I might acquire a taste for David's highly strung moral sentiment.
Until I get there, here's what I can do (and what you can do for that matter): I can start with the destruction of the slanderer I know best. None of his slandering is hid from me and he is very vulnerable to me. He looks back at me when I look in the mirror.