Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 182 · July 1
Thou Tellest
“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?”
The bottle is where this verse usually goes wrong. It gets preached as archaeology, that mourners in that world caught their tears in small glass vials and kept them on a shelf. The vials are real and sit in museums; what they held, and when, is a good deal less settled, and nothing in the psalm says any Israelite owned one.
What the verse is doing is counting. Thou tellest my wanderings, and tellest is the old English for numbering, the same word God uses with Abraham under the stars: tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. Psalm 147 puts it beyond doubt: He telleth the number of the stars. Then the line ends on a ledger. Are they not in thy book? Wanderings numbered, tears kept, the whole of it entered somewhere.
Which leaves a real question, and it should be allowed to stand. What is a count for? David is running when he writes this, hunted, and the psalm never says the running stopped. Being tallied and being rescued are two different mercies, and this verse hands over the first one without attaching a date to the second. As far as it goes is verse nine: When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn back: this I know; for God is for me.
Hold it there. He does not say he knows when.
God, you have the number. Every move we have made this year, and the nights we could not account for to anybody, and every tear we thought we got away without anyone seeing. We would rather be delivered than counted. Until we are, let it be enough that nothing has been lost, and that the book is yours. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 182 is Hidden in Trouble (Psalm 27:5).