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.”
Psalm 131 is only three verses long, and most of it describes a quiet heart instead of giving orders.
That is what makes it hard to read on a night when your mind will not switch off. "Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me." Great matters and things too high are exactly what your mind chews on at one in the morning: a decision that belongs to somebody else, an outcome you were never going to control, an argument you were not even part of. David says he has stopped carrying them, and the next verse shows that stopping took work: "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself." He settled his own heart the way a mother settles a restless child. Then he gives the picture: "as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child." A nursing baby comes to its mother for what she gives, and it cries when it wants feeding. A weaned child has already learned to go without that, and it still sits on her lap, simply to be with her.
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."
So before you go to bed, sort out what is on your mind. Some of it has been shown to you, and it really is yours to do this week. The rest belongs among God's secret things. Name that part to Him out loud, one thing at a time, and hand it over. You may still go to sleep with things unsettled, and that is all right. The psalm's one instruction tells you where to rest: "Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever." That is where a weaned child sleeps, close to the One who holds what it cannot.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 288 is Beautiful in His Time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).