Psalms 23:1-6: in context

Psalm 23 is so familiar that it is easy to stop hearing it, so it is worth noticing something in its grammar that most readers pass right over. For the first three verses, the psalmist talks about God in the third person. The LORD is my shepherd; he makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. God is being described, beautifully, but from a certain distance, the way you would tell someone about a person you admire. It is all he, he, he.

And then, exactly at the darkest point, the pronoun changes. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, the psalmist says, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Right there, in the valley, the language turns from about God to spoken to God. He stops describing the shepherd and starts addressing him directly: you are with me, your rod and your staff comfort me, you prepare a table before me, you anoint my head. The intimacy deepens not on the green hillside but in the dark ravine. It is in the shadow of death that the psalmist quits talking about God and finally talks to him, and God is nearer and more personal there than anywhere in the sunlit pastures. The valley did not push God away; it closed the distance.

That shift is worth carrying, because it reverses what we assume. We tend to think the green pastures are where God feels close and the dark valley is where he feels absent. The psalm says the opposite happened. Is God, for me, mostly a he I describe from a comfortable distance, and would it take a walk through the valley, as it did for the psalmist, to turn him into a you I actually speak to, and to find that he was closest exactly where it was darkest?