The Four Times

Somewhere in your week there is a slot for this, and the slot keeps collapsing. Ten minutes before the day starts, a family evening on a fixed night, and it has failed often enough now that you have stopped scheduling it and started feeling bad instead.

I want to tell you where Moses puts the teaching, because it sits somewhere other than where you have been trying to put it. He names four times: when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. Sitting, travelling, going to bed, getting up. That is a whole day, and there is no religious hour anywhere in it.

The verb behind teach them diligently comes off a root about sharpening, the word Hebrew uses for putting an edge on a blade. What it pictures is repetition: the same stroke, many times, on one edge. Nobody sharpens anything once, and nobody watching could pick out the important stroke.

The order matters as much as the times. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart comes first; the talking comes second, out of it. That is why the sentence standing in front of both is about you: thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. You may have no children in the house at all. Israel heard this as a congregation, so the ones watching are whoever they happen to be.

Here is the blessing on a house like yours, and it is not a better slot in the diary. These words in you before you go hunting for an hour in which to say them. The sitting and the walking and the lying down and the rising up ending their long career as the leftovers of a day that already failed. The ones watching taking an edge off a blade you did not know you carried. And you spared, for good, the belief that you missed it because the ten minutes went.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 2 is Enough (Lamentations 3:24).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two