Daily Manna · Day 43 · February 12
Shelter and Tower
“For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.”
The Judean wilderness runs about fifteen miles wide and drops four thousand feet, and it has almost no trees in it.
Which means that in that country, shade is architecture. A limestone outcrop with a west-facing overhang is not scenery, it is the difference between arriving and not arriving. Travellers navigated by them. Rock badgers live in them, and the psalms notice. And when the writer of Psalm 61 says from the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed, the thing he asks for next is not deliverance. It is lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
Verse 3, and it turns out he already knows the way there, because he has been before. Thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy. Hast been. Past tense, and it is doing the load-bearing work of the whole psalm. He is not guessing what God might do. He is naming what God has done and using the memory as a handhold while the current still pulls. A rock you have sheltered under once is a rock you can find in the dark.
Write down three. Three times you were certain it was finished and it was not. Put dates on them if you can find the dates. Keep the paper somewhere you will actually see it, and read it the next time the dread arrives before the driveway does. Memory is a tool, and most of us leave it in a drawer.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 43 is How Long (Psalm 13:1).