Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 1 · January 1
Guard the Source
“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”
The phone in your pocket is locked. Six digits or a face, and a timeout so short it irritates you, on a device whose worst case is money and embarrassment.
Keep is the word to stay with, and it is a guard word. Natsar is what a sentry does on a wall and what a watchman does in a vineyard while the fruit is worth stealing. The phrase around it runs as a comparison in Hebrew: of everything you keep watch over, keep watch over this. Bibles land that end of it differently, with all diligence, above all else, with all vigilance, all of them reaching for the same ranking. The heart is being set against the rest of your inventory and put at the top.
The reason given is drainage. Out of it are the issues of life, the outgoings, whatever runs from a source and downhill from there. Which is why the chapter packs a body around the line: two verses up, the ear and the eyes; two verses down, the mouth, the eyelids, the feet. Every one of those is a gate, and the father giving the instruction stops naming gates for a moment to name the reservoir they all drain from.
Run the comparison, then. The phone is guarded because you know precisely what losing it would cost. The heart is watched by nobody, on the working assumption that what is in there is private and therefore contained. It is not contained. It has been running downhill into your week since before breakfast, and it is the one item you own that cannot be replaced by ringing the bank.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 1 is Unflinching Light (Psalm 27:1).