Help from the Creator

You keep looking at the problem. Down at the phone, sideways at what other people appear to have, and then back at the thing itself, as though staring at it long enough will reduce its size.

The first line of this psalm is more interesting than it looks, and honest translators have gone two ways with it. It can be read as the confident statement everyone knows: I lift my eyes to the hills, and that is where my help comes from. It can equally be read as a question the second verse then corrects: I lift up mine eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh my help? And there is a reason to take it that way, because the hills around that road were where the shrines were. High places, altars, the local gods people climbed up to when they were frightened. A pilgrim raising his eyes to the skyline was looking at a lot of available help, most of it useless.

Verse two answers, and it answers with a title rather than a feeling. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. Not from the hills. From the one who made the horizon the hills are part of. The psalm's argument is scale: whoever spoke matter into existence is not going to be stretched thin by your situation, and every other elevated thing you were looking at is scenery he built.

So the loop does have a stopping point, and willpower is not it. A question about elevation gets answered with a title about creation, which means the psalm was never telling you to worry less. It was telling you that you have been scanning the wrong horizon.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 350 is The Vineyard Inventory (Isaiah 5:4).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna