Hidden in Trouble

Nobody in your house knows what this week is doing to you.

Against that silence, a man with enemies close enough to name, writing about a pavilion and a tabernacle. Neither is a metaphor he invented. A pavilion is the king's tent in a war camp, and to be inside it was to be under the personal protection of the man who owned the army. The inner place of the tabernacle was not somewhere you wandered into; the whole architecture existed to say that some space is not general access. And underneath the picture lay a custom everyone knew: a man with blood on his hands could reach the sanctuary and take hold of the altar, and being inside changed what could be done to him.

Now: you have a car, a bathroom door that locks, and a phone that will not stop. There is no altar within driving distance. But the distance between then and now is smaller than it looks, because the promise was never about the fabric of the tent. It was about whose tent it is. And notice the one thing that does not change: he shall hide me in the time of trouble. In it, not from it. He is still inside the week he is inside. What moves is his location within it, and then he is set up upon a rock, which is not hiding at all but the opposite: high, visible, and out of reach.

So pray it in the plainest words you have.

God, I have been carrying this since Monday and nobody knows what it is doing to me. Take me into the inner room. I am not asking to be taken out of the week. Hide me while I am in it, and when you have, set me somewhere I can stand up. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 182 is Thou Tellest (Psalm 56:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna