He Wist Not

What had already gone before the morning he found out? He awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. He is not bracing for anything. He expects the day to work the way every other day has worked, and then comes the sentence that ends the chapter's first half. And he wist not that the LORD was departed from him.

Sit with that a minute without repairing it. The terms went back to before his birth, and no razor shall come on his head was one of three; the other two had been going for years, the honey scooped out of a lion's carcase, the feast at Timnath, a life spent handling everything he had been told to keep clear of. The hair was the last item on a list. Nobody told him. No warning in the text, no dream, no prophet at the door, and the narrator declines to supply one. He learns it by trying to stand up.

And the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house. Two lines later, with no comment: Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven. Judges will not tell you what to make of that either, and it ends where it ends, with a blind man asking to be strengthened only this once and pulling a roof down on himself and the three thousand on it. Hebrews later puts his name in a list of the faithful and explains nothing. If it were leaving you the way it left him, quietly, over years, in things you had stopped counting, what would you expect to notice on the morning it mattered?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 338 is Pleasure in the Fearful (Psalm 147:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two