Happy March!
We are in that hard time of year when the seasons are in conflict. We’ve gone from about 50 degrees to a minus 3 degrees within a week…and I heard on the weather last night that in another week, we could get another 6 to 12 inches of snow. The weather guy said that “that’s what it’s looking like now, but that’s a long ways a way…so we’ll know more as this week progresses.” Small comfort there.
In Psalm 1, the Psalmist talks about “a tree planted by streams of water.” If we, as Eugene Peterson suggests, focus on “a tree planted by streams of water,” and meditate on that picture, who knows what we will discover. Consider that meditating is like “chewing on; digesting; taking into one self, and absorbing all the nutrients that are offered in food, or in this case in the image. Consider that tree as Israel transplanted in exile in Babylon, a flat, and arid land with a network of irrigation ditches and that tree is transplanted there—by the water in an arid land. This was an inhospitable land to the Israelites in many regards. They were far away from the Temple in Jerusalem, how could they possibly pray in such an environment?