Daily Manna · Day 22 · January 22
Daily Loaded
“Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation. Selah.”
Somewhere on a road in the hill country, a procession is moving up to the sanctuary, and the song they are singing begins with the words Moses used whenever the ark set out: Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.
Halfway through, the song stops being about armies and starts being about weather. Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, whereby thou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary. That is the same God, in the same psalm, and rain in that country was not scenery. It was the difference between a harvest and a funeral, and it came without anybody arranging it. Out of that comes verse 19: he daily loadeth us with benefits. Loadeth is a freight word, the piling of weight onto an animal or a cart. And then Selah, which nobody has fully cracked and which has always been read as a pause.
Take the pause. Rain fell somewhere last week on ground you have never seen, and the wheat in the bread you ate this morning grew because of rain that fell before you thought to ask for any. Your lungs took roughly twenty thousand breaths yesterday without your supervision.
What the psalm claims is not sentiment. The loading is daily, it is heavy, it happens whether you notice it or not, and the one doing the loading is named in the same line as the God of our salvation. The benefits and the rescue come off the same cart.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 22 is When I Awake (Psalm 17:15).