Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 288 · October 15
Things Too High
“Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.”
Three verses, and there is nothing in this psalm for anybody to do.
It reports a condition rather than prescribing one, which is what makes it hard to read on a night when your head will not stop. Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Great matters and things too high are the material your mind works over at one in the morning: somebody else's decision, an outcome you were never going to control, an argument you were not even in. David says he has stopped, and the verb has effort inside it, Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, so the quiet was arrived at, and it cost him something. Then the picture: as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. A nursing child is with its mother for what she supplies, and it cries when it wants it. A weaned child has already been through losing that, and is on her lap anyway.
Moses drew the same line for a whole nation in one sentence. The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. Sort tonight's list before you go up: what is revealed and actually yours to do this week, and what has been sitting on you as somebody else's secret. Hand the second half over out loud, by name, and then go to bed with the whole thing still unsettled, which is where a weaned child sleeps.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 288 is Beautiful in His Time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).