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 fixing. Part of the reason is that you have spent the week feeding something that never once told you it was full.
Take the psalm's own sentence: "Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing." There are two verbs, and people hurry past the second one. Nowhere does the verse promise that God hands every creature whatever it can dream up. It says He satisfies, and the Hebrew word means being full after a good meal. It speaks to the desire God built into each creature. Hunger is answered with food, and thirst with water. The appetite God put in is matched to the supply He made for it. Think of ravens, deer, and the roots under your lawn. None of them asked for anything yesterday, and all of them were fed.
Notice the line just before it, because the psalm has an order and the order matters: "The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season." Waiting comes first, and "in due season" does not always mean right now. This psalm is about a God who feeds everything that lives, and it still puts a wait in the sentence.
The trouble is that many of your appetites were never planted by Him, and those are exactly the ones that never fill. You have been holding out your hand under a hand that opens, asking it for things it does not give out. Then you have decided it must be closed.
So here is an invitation, with no checklist attached. Eat one meal this week slowly, with your phone face down, and receive it as a gift from His hand. Then think of the thing you keep feeding that never fills you. You are free to leave it unfed once, and to find out what the emptiness was pointing to. Nobody is checking on you. The God who opens His hand to every living thing has not closed it to you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 155 is Nothing New (Ecclesiastes 1:9).