Going Out and Coming In

A congregation stands to sing a hymn that opens with a man on a road: Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land. William Williams wrote it in Welsh in 1745, and he was not writing metaphorically about the inner life. He spent about forty years riding some three thousand miles a year around Wales, preaching. He wrote a travelling song because he was travelling.

Psalm 121 is the same kind of song. It is one of the Songs of Ascents, sung by people going up to Jerusalem, and it begins with a real problem. The singer lifts his eyes to the hills and asks where his help is going to come from. The hills are not scenery. They are where the road is dangerous. The answer comes immediately, and it has nothing to do with the hills: help comes from the God who made heaven and earth.

From there the psalm narrows, verse by verse, until it lands on this one. Verse 7 is the widest claim it makes, he shall preserve thy soul, and verse 8 is the most ordinary: thy going out and thy coming in. Those two phrases together are a Hebrew way of saying everything a person does. But they are also literal, and the literal sense is the point in a walking psalm. Every leaving. Every returning. And then the time-stamp, which is the largest thing in the psalm: from this time forth, and even for evermore.

So: the doorway. It is where the dread hits, keys in hand, one foot outside, chest already knowing the shape of the day. The psalm was written by somebody standing exactly there. It has two directions in it, and most of us have only ever prayed about one of them, which means we come home each evening under a promise we never bothered to collect.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 112 is Consider Your Ways (Haggai 1:5).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna