What do you do when you first wake up? Many of us reach for our phones. Or wake already ambushed by worries for the coming day before we've even made coffee. David shows us what it looks like to wake up and orient toward God first.

Psalm 5 is a morning psalm, a counterpart to the evening Psalm 4, and it opens with a fun little detail: it was written for the flutes! These tiny words give us a window into a living worship culture. Craftsmen shaping instruments, a king who was as musical as he was poetic. We can picture ancient Israelites as real people -- waking up, creating, worrying and mourning, falling in love, baking bread. The distance we feel from biblical figures collapses a little when we imagine them as human as we are, and remember that their faith was embodied, creative, and daily.

Psalm 5 also contains one of the harder lines in the Psalter: "you hate all evildoers." We sit with this honestly, tracing the Hebrew word sane' — not passive disapproval, but active moral opposition, repelled like oil and water. God hating evildoers is not a license for human judgment, nor a statement about people who fails. It is the response of a morally consistent Creator to systemic destruction of life. Far from threatening, this is actually the ground of the psalm's hope — a God whose character doesn't shift with the weather is the one you can trust to hold each morning.