Commit Your Way

I am writing to you as someone who struggles with this as much as you do, so I am not speaking from higher ground.

You know the tiredness I mean. It does not come from hard work. It comes from trying to control an outcome that was never ours to control. We run the conversation again at midnight. We draft the reply we will never send. We go over the same four possibilities again and again, long after they have stopped telling us anything new.

The verb in this psalm is a physical one: "Commit thy way unto the LORD." The Hebrew word for commit is galal, which means to roll. It is the word for rolling a stone off a road, or rolling a load off your back onto a cart. So this is more than a trick of the mind. It describes a weight leaving one pair of shoulders and landing on another. The psalm gives it as a command, because nobody does it once and finds it finished. Then comes the second part, which is where you and I both fail: "trust also in him." If you hand a thing over and take it back every hour, you have not really handed it over. You have only found a very tiring way of holding on.

Notice what is promised at the end, because it is smaller and better than the version we usually hear: "he shall bring it to pass." It does not promise that things will go the way you want. It says the Lord will act, and that the acting is His. It is a promise about who is doing the work.

Here is a prayer we can both pray: Lord, this is Yours now. I give You the job, the child who will not talk to me, and the result that is due on Thursday. I have rolled it over to You. I already know I will have picked it up again by lunchtime, so I am telling You now instead of promising otherwise. When I pick it up again, help me pray this same prayer instead of starting the argument over. You said You would bring it to pass. I do not need to know how. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 330 is Filthy Rags (Isaiah 64:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna