Daily Manna · Day 246 · September 3
Blessed for Trusting
“Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is.”
Jerusalem, in the last years before the siege, with Egypt on one side and Babylon on the other and a king in the palace trying to guess which way to lean.
Jeremiah's blessing arrives with a picture, and the picture is itemised. Read on one verse and he counts it out. The tree is planted by the waters. It spreads out her roots by the river. It shall not see when heat cometh. Her leaf shall be green. It shall not be careful in the year of drought. Neither shall cease from yielding fruit. Six clauses, and not one of them promises that the heat stays away.
The list only works because of the list before it. Two verses earlier stands the man who makes flesh his arm, and he gets his own inventory: a shrub in the desert, in a salt land not inhabited, who shall not see when good cometh. Same drought. Same country. The difference is entirely underground.
The king leaned toward Egypt in the end, and the heat came anyway. It was always going to come anyway. The passage never once asks whether you can avoid the year of drought. It asks what your roots are in when it arrives.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 246 is The Barrel and the Boy (1 Kings 17:16).