Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 40 · February 9
No Overseer
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:”
How much of what you did this morning got done because somebody would have noticed if it had not?
Her industry is the obvious lesson. The line doing the real work is the next one. Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler. Three words for a boss, stacked up, and the ant has none of them. A colony has a queen and she is not management; she lays eggs. Nobody in that nest is supervised, and the food still goes in before the weather turns.
Then the timing. Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. She works to a calendar in the months when nothing is wrong yet, the only stretch of the year the work can be done at all. Proverbs comes back to her in its last chapter, among four small things that are exceeding wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer. Strength is never the compliment. Timing is.
The sluggard answers the charge in his own words, and it sounds reasonable: yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. Nobody there has refused to work. He has postponed, in small amounts, on a fine morning. The bill arrives on a schedule of its own: so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.
May you be given the ant's sense of what month it is. May the work nobody is checking get done in you anyway, in the weeks when there is no reason to. And may the winter, when it reaches your house, find the store already in.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 40 is Continual Guide (Isaiah 58:11).