Commit Your Way

We are both bad at this, so I am not writing to you from higher ground.

You know the tiredness I mean. It is not the tiredness of work. It is the particular exhaustion of managing an outcome that was never ours to manage: running the conversation again at midnight, drafting the reply we will not send, going over the same four possibilities in a loop that has stopped producing anything new.

The verb in this psalm is a physical one. Commit is galal, to roll, the way you roll a stone off a road or a load off your back onto a cart. It is not a mental technique. It describes something leaving one set of shoulders and arriving on another, and the reason the psalm has to say it in the imperative is that nobody does it once and finds it done. Then the second half, which is where you and I both fail: trust also in him. Handing a thing over and taking it back every hour is not handing it over. It is a very tiring way of holding on.

And 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. Not that it goes the way you want. That he will act, and that the acting is his. A promise about who is working, not about what the outcome will be.

Lord, this is yours now. The job, the child who is not speaking, the result due on Thursday. I have rolled it over, and I already know I will have picked it up again by lunchtime, so I am telling you that now rather than promising otherwise. When it comes back, let me say this same sentence instead of reopening the argument. You said you would bring it to pass. I am not asking to be told 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