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 life gets bad?
Everybody has somewhere: the garage, a long drive with the radio turned up, a screen at midnight. It helps for an hour. Then you come back out, and everything is exactly where you left it. That is how the hiding places we choose for ourselves always work.
David names his hiding place, and it is worth reading the verses before it to see what it cost him to get there. He writes, "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long," and then, "my moisture is turned into the drought of summer." He is describing what hiding his sin from God did to his body. Then comes the turn: "I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid." So when he finally says, "Thou art my hiding place," he is speaking to the very One he had been avoiding. There was no other way in.
What he finds there is more than shelter: "thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance." To compass about means to surround on every side, the way an army surrounds a city. Yet what surrounds David is singing. The trouble has not ended, and his rescue is already being celebrated out loud while the trouble is still in the room.
So say the thing you have been carrying alone. Say it to God first, in words. Then tell one trusted person who will keep it to themselves. Then put some music on in the kitchen and let songs about God's rescue fill the room. You do not have to wait for the trouble to end before you are 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).