Daily Manna · Day 348 · December 14
Hiding Place and Songs
“Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.”
Where do you go when it gets bad?
Everybody has somewhere. A garage. A long drive with the radio up. A screen at midnight. It holds for an hour, and then you come back out and everything is exactly where you left it, which is the defining property of the places we choose ourselves.
David names his, and it is worth reading the four verses in front of it to see what it cost him to get there. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. My moisture is turned into the drought of summer. That is a man describing what hiding something from God did to his body. And then the turn: I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. The refuge he finally names in this verse is the person he had been avoiding. There was no other door into it.
And what he finds inside is stranger than cover. Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Compassed about is siege language, surrounded on every side, and what surrounds him is singing. Not quiet. Not the trouble ending. Rescue being celebrated out loud while the situation is still in the room.
So say the thing you have been carrying alone: to God first, in words, and then to one person who will not repeat it. Then put music on in the kitchen and let somebody else's words of rescue fill the room, because you are not required to wait for the trouble to finish before anyone is allowed to sing.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 348 is Fire in the Bones (Jeremiah 20:9).