Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 333 · November 29
Calves of the Stall
“But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.”
A byre door pulled open at the end of winter, and the animals coming out sideways into light they have not seen for months, unable to walk straight for the joy of the ground.
That is the last picture in the Old Testament and it is the second of two. The verse above yours burns: the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud shall be stubble, neither root nor branch. Then this one, on the same morning, for a different set of people. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. Two futures, one sunrise, and the sun in the image does what a sun does whether or not anybody asked it to. Nobody organises a dawn. The last clause is worth checking across versions, because the King James stands almost alone: of the ten English Bibles on this device, eight read leap, or gambol, or frolic. What the picture is after is release, and the noise a shed makes when the door goes.
Winter is going to end where you are, on a date you did not set and cannot bring forward. You will go out of that door badly, the way animals do, on legs that have not been used. And the light that finds you will have come up over the whole country at once, for everybody who fears his name, with healing carried in it the way warmth is carried in a wing.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 333 is God Not Ashamed (Hebrews 11:16).