Daily Manna · Day 25 · January 25
Refuge from the Storm
“For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.”
A wall with the wind hitting it, and someone standing in the narrow strip of shade beside it because there is nowhere else to stand.
The furnace went in February and the quote came back higher than what is in the account. You have run the arithmetic three times hoping the numbers move. They do not. This is not a season you are managing. It is a season you are absorbing, and the tiredness that comes from absorbing is a different tiredness altogether.
Isaiah sings this line while looking at a city reduced to a heap, and he does not pretend about the weather. The blast of the terrible ones is still a storm against the wall. The heat has not let up. Nothing in the verse says the storm ends. What it says is that there is a shadow standing inside the storm, and it names precisely who it was built for: a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress. Not the resourceful. Not the ones holding it together. The address is low ground, and low ground is where you currently live.
That is all there is today. No lesson has been extracted from this. If you want something to do, do the small honest thing: say the real number to someone who can carry it with you. The needy get help. That is the whole point of the verse.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 25 is Let This Mind (Philippians 2:5).