Daily Manna · Day 364 · December 30
Our Guide Unto Death
“For this God is our God for ever and ever: he will be our guide even unto death.”
Have you asked the older person in your life whether they are afraid?
Watching a parent get old is its own education. The slower stairs, the pill organiser, the call from the hospital you had been expecting for a year. Somewhere in the middle of it you do the arithmetic on your own remaining decades, and the number lands differently than it used to.
The psalm this line closes has been doing something civic up to that point. Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces. Count the fortifications, it says, so you can tell the next generation, which is a solid and sensible thing to do with a city. And then it refuses to stop at the wall. For this God is our God for ever and ever: he will be our guide even unto death.
Those last words are genuinely difficult in Hebrew, and translators have gone different ways with them; some read unto death, others read for evermore. What is not in dispute is the direction of the sentence. The psalm will not end on masonry. It follows the reader off the end of everything countable, into the one stretch of road that cannot be rehearsed and that no companion can walk beside you on.
So ask, and then stay in the chair and say nothing while it is answered. Do not repair it, do not put a verse on it, do not move the conversation somewhere more comfortable for you. Fear spoken in front of somebody who does not leave is fear that has stopped being carried alone, and the silence you keep while it is being said is most of what makes that possible.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 364 is Prove Your Own Selves (2 Corinthians 13:5).