Angels Encamped Around You

You check the locks twice, and it is not because of a noise.

And there is a harder thing under that, which this verse can make worse before it makes anything better. You know of people who were encamped around and were not delivered. The child who did not come home. The believer whose scan came back the wrong way twice. If the angel of the LORD pitches his tent around those that fear him, then somebody has to say the obvious thing, which is that the camp does not look like a camp from inside a hospital corridor at four in the afternoon.

The psalm knows. It is worth staying with this rather than hurrying past it. The superscription puts it after David escaped a Philistine court by feigning madness, scrabbling at the gate with spit running into his beard, and it is the same psalm that says, further down, many are the afflictions of the righteous. Not few. Many. He does not promise a quiet life anywhere in it. Encampeth is an army word, a camp pitched and staying pitched, and what it promises is presence around the trouble rather than the absence of it. Delivereth them is real, and it is a different word from spares them.

So we are left holding both halves, and there is no honest way to put them down. Many afflictions. A camp that does not move.

Lord, I do not understand the ones who were not spared, and I am not going to pretend to tonight. I am not asking you to explain it. I am asking you to be what the verse says you are, around this house, around the people I cannot protect, whether or not I can see anything at all from here. Stay pitched. That is the whole of my prayer.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 293 is Alone on the Roof (Psalm 102:7).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna