The Valley Made a Well

Four people have sent him that verse this year and the fourth one killed it.

Psalm 84:6. Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well. It used to be one of his favorites, actually, years ago, in a good season, when he read it in a chair on a Sunday afternoon and it did something in him.

Now it arrives on his phone. In a card. Twice in a text with a picture of a sunrise on it.

And every time it arrives it comes with an implication that nobody has ever said out loud, and the implication is: this year is producing something, and you should be able to see that, and if you cannot see it yet then you will, and in the meantime here is a verse.

He has had a hard year. He is not going to list it here and he does not talk about it much. It has not been the sort of year that produces anything visible and he is fairly sure some of it is simply lost.

And now a verse he loved is a thing he flinches at, which feels like a small theft on top of everything else, and he cannot say that to any of the four people because every one of them meant it kindly and two of them cried when they sent it.

Read what the verse actually says

Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them. Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools (Psalm 84:5 and 6).

Three things in there that the sunrise picture never has room for.

First: passing through. The people in that verse are not living in the valley and not building in it. They are on a road, going somewhere, and the valley is a stretch of it. Nobody in the psalm is being told to settle down and find the good in the place.

Second: Baca. It is generally taken to mean weeping, or possibly a kind of dry shrub that grows where nothing else does. Either way, it is not a nice valley. The psalm names it as the hard part of the journey.

Third, and this is the one that matters most: they make it a well. Not: they discover it was secretly a well all along. Not: the valley turns out to have been good. They dig. Something happens in a dry place because people passing through it did something, and then the verse says the rain also fills the pools, which is God supplying what a person cannot.

You are passing through something and you are not required to call it good. That is the plain sense of the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an over-quoted line honest again for a man who has stopped being able to hear it, because Scripture says He guides into all truth rather than into a better attitude.

The theft

Now let me name what happened to the verse, because it deserves naming.

Something was taken from you this year, and one of the things taken was a verse you used to love. That is not a small thing and it is not silly to be annoyed about it. A passage that has become a thing people hand to you as a way of ending a conversation is no longer a passage you can read; it is a piece of somebody else's discomfort.

And all four of them meant well. That is true and it makes the whole thing harder rather than easier.

You are not ungrateful for flinching at a verse that has been used to close conversations. The word says a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver (Proverbs 25:11), which means Scripture itself cares about how and when something is said, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a word land at the right moment rather than merely arrive.

Digging, and then rain

Here is the part I want you to keep, and it is the part the sunrise picture always cuts off.

They make it a well, and the rain also fills the pools.

Two clauses. One about people doing something, and one about God doing something, and the order is: the digging first and the rain second. Nobody in that verse produces water. They produce a hole. The filling is not their department.

Which means what is asked of a person in a valley is not that they find meaning in it, or improve their attitude toward it, or extract a lesson from it. What is asked is that they keep going and do the small hard work in front of them, and the supply is somebody else's business.

You are asked to keep walking and to dig, and the filling was never yours to arrange. Scripture puts the making of the well and the filling of the pools in separate clauses with different subjects, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies what a man cannot, because He is described as living water and not as a lesson.

And I will be plain, because you have had a year of people not being. Nothing here says this year produced something. Some of it may be simply lost, and I am not going to tell you otherwise in order to make a verse work. What is settled is that the verse says passing through, and that the filling of the pools was never your job.