Verse of the Day for March 18

Psalm 131 is three verses long and is one of the few places in scripture where a man describes his own inner life as settled without sounding as though he is boasting about it.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.

The image is precise and easy to soften. A nursing child at its mother is content because it is being fed. A weaned child at its mother is content simply to be there.

That is the difference the psalm is describing. Not the absence of desire, but the end of a relationship organised entirely around getting something.

And the first verse tells you what had to go first: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. He stopped carrying questions that were never his to settle.

Quieted myself is active. It is something he did, and by his own account it took doing.

Much of our restlessness with God is the restlessness of someone waiting to be fed rather than someone content to be near.

Weaning is not a loss. It is what makes the second kind of nearness possible.