Everlasting Arms

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

There is a fear that only arrives when the house has gone quiet. It is not the bill or the scan. It is the fear of the bottom, of the whole structure giving way at once and no floor anywhere under the falling.

Moses says this while he is dying. Deuteronomy thirty-three is his blessing on the tribes, spoken before his death, and the striking thing is where he puts this line. He is handing them a country. Underneath the country he sets something no country can supply. Not a ledge you might catch on the way down, which is what most reassurance amounts to. Arms with no end to them, already in position before anyone started falling. Read on in the verse and the arms are not passive either: he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee.

So put the outcome you have refused to look at directly into actual words, and then set one line underneath it: the arms are lower than that. Then go and finish the ordinary thing you have been too braced to start.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 259 is A Famine of Hearing (Amos 8:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna