Like a Tree

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

Father, we notice the order before we notice anything else. Walking, standing, sitting. Nobody decides to become contemptuous. We listen to a voice we half agree with, then we stop arguing back, then one morning we find we have taken a seat and it has our name on it. The psalm describes the slide as a slowing down, and that is exactly how it has felt.

And you do not stop at the refusal. The psalm states the same man twice, once by what he will not do and once by what he wants: his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. Delight, not duty. The word for meditate is the one used of a lion growling over its food and of a dove murmuring, a low continuous sound, something worked over rather than skimmed. We have not been doing that. We have been reading you the way we read everything else.

You know what we scroll before we sleep, and which voice in it leaves us contemptuous of people we have never met. Take it. Or give us the honesty to take it ourselves.

And here is the promise we are holding you to, in the terms you set. Not that we prosper on demand. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither. In his season, which means not now, and not to a schedule we choose. A planted tree does not panic in a dry August, because the roots went to the water long before anyone was watching, and the leaf holds when everything around it browns. Plant us. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 105 is A City of Truth (Zechariah 8:16).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna