Daily Manna · Day 155 · June 4
Desire Satisfied
“Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.”
You are tired in a way that sleep is not touching, and some of it is that you have spent the week feeding something that never once said it was full.
Take the psalm's own sentence. Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing. Two verbs, and the second is the one people hurry past. Not indulgest. Satisfiest, and the Hebrew word is the one for being full after a meal. Its object is not every want a creature can generate; it is the desire built into the creature. Hunger answered with food, thirst with water, the appetite God installed matched to the supply he made for it. Ravens, deer, the roots under your lawn. Not one of them filed a request yesterday and all of them ate.
Notice the line immediately before, because the psalm has an order and the order is not decorative. Every living thing has its eyes on him, and he gives each its meat in due season. Waiting comes first. In due season is not the same as now. This is a psalm about a God who feeds everything alive, and it still puts a wait in the sentence.
The difficulty is that a long list of your appetites was never planted by him, and those are exactly the ones that do not fill. You have been holding your hand under a hand that opens, asking it for things it does not dispense, and then concluding that it must be shut.
So this is an invitation, not an assignment. Eat one meal this week slowly with the screen face down, and let it be received rather than consumed. Whatever you keep feeding that never fills you, you are free to leave it unfed once and find out what the emptiness was pointing at. Nobody is checking on you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 155 is Nothing New (Ecclesiastes 1:9).