Flourishing Like Palm Trees

Retirement can be quiet in a way nobody warns you about. A man who used to get phone calls about problems that needed his judgment now has a phone on the table that does not ring before noon. He makes a second coffee at nine, because there is nothing else to do in the morning.

This psalm has a heading that tells you where it belongs: "A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day." It is the only psalm with that title. Israel sang it on the one day of the week when nobody worked or produced anything. That is worth holding on to, because a song for a day of no work is a strange place to find a promise about bearing fruit. Whatever these trees are doing, they are not doing it by their output.

The pictures are chosen with care. In that country a palm tree grows where there is water. A date palm takes years before it bears any fruit, and then it keeps bearing for many decades. A cedar of Lebanon can stand for hundreds of years. Then comes the line that carries the condition, the one most readings skip: "Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God." These trees are planted there to stay. And the next line is plain on purpose about age: "They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing."

So the real question is not what you plan to do with your retirement. It is where you are planted, and whether anybody could tell by looking. That means what you are rooted in, more than what you attend. Ask it in a season when nobody has given you a role and there is no output to point at. The promise is for exactly that season, and the psalm's last verse says why it holds: the fruit is there "To shew that the LORD is upright: he is my rock."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 231 is Prepared His Heart (Ezra 7:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna