Daily Manna · Day 82 · March 23
Under His Wings
“He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.”
There are years when you are the person everybody else leans on, and nobody notices that nothing is leaning back.
This psalm has a picture for that and it is not flattering to anyone. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust. That is a bird over a nest, and the thing under the wing is a chick: small, useless, incapable of contributing anything to its own survival. It is not a picture of a partnership. The Hebrew word behind it is the same one used of the mother eagle in Deuteronomy and of the wings over the mercy seat, so it is not sentimental, but it is unmistakably about something helpless being covered by something that is not.
And then the psalm does something that keeps it honest, which is why it is worth reading slowly rather than being handed to somebody as a promise of safety. It names the shield in the same breath: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Not your feelings about being covered. What He has said. And the verses on either side name what is actually out there: the snare of the fowler, the pestilence, the terror by night, the arrow that flieth by day, the destruction that wasteth at noonday. This is not a psalm written by someone unfamiliar with how badly things go.
You have carried it since you were young and it has cost more than anybody knows. That is not a failure of faith and it does not need to be reframed as one today.
The truth here is not an instruction. The covering is offered to the helpless, and there is no version of it available to something strong enough not to need it. A chick that runs out from under the wing is not being brave.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 82 is Two Kinds of Speech (Psalm 19:1).