Daily Manna · Day 154 · June 3
Ordered Steps
“The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.”
What do you do with a life that is not the one you planned?
Not the tragic version of that question. The ordinary one. The job that fell through, the move that was cancelled, the city you did not choose, and the low steady grief of living on a detour with no visible route back to the road you drew.
The verse handed to people at that point is this one, and it is usually handed over wrongly, as if it meant every turn had been secretly arranged for your benefit and you should feel better now. Read it where it sits. Psalm 37 has spent twenty-two verses contrasting two kinds of people, and these ordered steps belong to one of them; good is supplied by the translators, and the psalm's subject throughout is the person whose life is set toward God. The promise is not that any path you pick is his. It is that a surrendered path is directed, and that he delighteth in his way, which is a strange thing to say about a road that runs through this.
Read one verse further, because the psalm knows what you are actually asking. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. That sentence assumes the fall. It does not prevent it. It is a promise about what the ground is made of when you land on it.
So the truth to carry is smaller and harder than the one usually offered. You were never promised your route. You were promised that the walking is directed, that God takes pleasure in the road even where you cannot, and that falling on it is survivable, not because you walk well but because of who has hold of your hand.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 154 is Jesus Wept (John 11:35).