The Secret Place

You reach for prayer the way you reach for the extinguisher under the sink. You know where it is. You would rather not need it.

Set that aside for a minute, because this psalm is not primarily about your access. It is a description of a person, and then a run of descriptions of God, and the sheer accumulation is the point. He is the most High, which is a word about rank, above every competing power. He is the Almighty, Shaddai, the old patriarchal name for God as sufficient. Two lines later He is refuge and fortress, one a place you run to and one a place built to be held. Further down He is the one with feathers and wings and also the one whose truth is a shield and buckler, which is a strange pair of images to hold in one hand and the psalm holds them anyway. Then angels given charge, and lions and adders underfoot, and long life, and salvation shown rather than merely delivered.

None of that is a technique. It is an inventory of somebody, and the psalm spends fifteen of its sixteen verses on Him.

Which is what makes the first line's participle land the way it does. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. Dwelleth, not visits. The shelter is not being rationed. It is simply that shade belongs to whoever is standing under the tree, and a person who comes out only when the weather turns has been standing somewhere else.

So, given all of that: what exactly have you been doing with the other twenty-three hours?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 77 is Two Days or a Year (Numbers 9:17).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna