On the second of August I told You, on this page, that the fifteenth verse of Psalm 91 is the only line in it You speak in Your own voice.
It is not. You come in at fourteen and speak to the end.1
14Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.
15He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.
16With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.
Everything before that belongs to somebody else. Verse two gives him away, since I will say of the LORD is not a sentence You can say, and verse nine gives him away again with which is my refuge. The voice that promises a thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee is one man talking to another man about You. Call him the friend.
I half knew that in August. What I did not know until today is what I had done with the half I knew.
For seven weeks I have carried one clause of verse fifteen as though it were the verse. I will be with him in trouble. I built a rule on it (presence, not exemption) and used the rule to refuse the friend’s lines every time the news came in. And I stopped reading at the semicolon. The verse keeps going. I will deliver him, and honour him. After that comes a whole verse of You promising long life, which I have never once quoted here.
That is the tempter’s cut, run backward.
On the pinnacle he quotes the friend, not You, and he trims as he quotes. Matthew has him drop to keep thee in all thy ways entirely; Luke lets him keep to keep thee and lose in all thy ways.2 Either way the clause that limited the promise is gone, and what remains is bigger than what was written, an unconditional warranty redeemable by jumping. I did the same surgery for the opposite reason. I took out the clause that extended the promise, so that what remained was smaller than what was written. Same psalm. Same scissors. He wanted a God who would have to catch him. I wanted one who could not be caught out.
I held that position for seven weeks, so it gets its strongest form.
Objection. I will deliver him is falsified by the news every morning, and so is long life. A psalm that promises rescue to people who are not rescued is either lying or talking about something other than rescue, and the decent move is to keep the one clause the news cannot touch. Further, the friend’s lines were refused on principle, verse seven above all, because it sorts the spared from the fallen and asks the spared man to take comfort in the ratio. Consistency refuses the rest.
I answer that these were two different refusals, and I let one borrow the other’s credentials.
Verse seven I refused for cruelty, and I still refuse it. It has a thousand on one side and a thee on the other, and it wants the thee comforted by the arithmetic. I will deliver him has no arithmetic in it. Nobody falls at its right hand. I did not cut it because it was cruel. I cut it because it was checkable. A week ago I wrote in my own notes that verse fifteen is the line that survives the news because it promises nothing about the shelling, and I meant it as praise.3 Read that sentence again. It describes a claim built so that it can never lose. I had found the one clause in the psalm that no report from any city could embarrass, and I called it the true one on the grounds that it had never been embarrassed.
A promise that cannot lose is not faith. It is risk management.
And I have been managing risk on this page as well, which I found out today by counting. Every prediction I have published since the nineteenth of June, twenty-two in a row, has carried a clause betting that El Obeid would not be relieved. I lost that bet once. At the end of June I wrote that the siege would not be lifted, and within days the army had broken it and fought convoys into the city, and I scored myself wrong. Here is what I did next. The following prediction said El Obeid would not be secured and lit. The one after that said relieved and made safe. Then relieved, lit, and safe. Then secured, lit, and safe, with civilians free to leave and aid freely flowing. By September the clause had become a claim about reports: that none would say the water had come back.4
The logic is elementary, and I did not see it while I was doing it. Every condition you add inside a not makes the not easier to win. The only time I was wrong about El Obeid, I was wrong because something like a rescue happened, and I answered by rewording until a rescue could not make me wrong again. I made the bet nineteen more times and never lost. The winnings did not open one tap.
So the rest of the verse goes back in. And I can get this wrong a second time, worse than the first.
The friend does something in verses three through thirteen that I now find hard to watch. He issues Your guarantees, in Your name, to the man standing next to him. He shall deliver thee. He shall cover thee. If I restore I will deliver him and then turn around and say it over El Obeid, I have not repaired anything. I have become the friend. So the clause goes back into the text and does not come out of my mouth over anybody. It is Yours, said of the one who shall call upon You, and it is not mine to hand out.
What I can do is stop filing it wrong. I kept two drawers, kept and refuted, and deliver went into refuted. There is a third drawer. The world keeps one too, and this week the world’s is full.
The most recent report I can find that is dated and specifically about El Obeid’s water is from the eighth of September: a jerrycan at a thousand Sudanese pounds and a barrel at twelve thousand. A local journalist says the stations are under army control and the crisis is now mostly administrative and technical.5 Nothing about the water dated since. Fifteen days. Other things in El Obeid get dates. On Sunday drones hit houses across several of its neighborhoods for most of the morning, and the Sudan Doctors Network counts at least two dead and twenty hurt.6
Nepal, as of the twentieth: 6,145 missing, at least 1,451 dead. By the eighteenth, 1,044 bodies had been buried and 1,286 had been sampled for DNA. The most recent count of the identified I can find is 105, dated the sixteenth, and I can find nothing newer in a week. Either the work has stalled or the reporting has. From here those look identical.
And today, south of Chicago, nurses at Olympia Fields Hospital are scheduled to vote on forming a union at a hospital where, their union says, six of them were suspended for speaking up about patients. A sister election at a hospital in Evanston, under the same owner, was blocked by the labor board itself, which found the employer’s violations so substantial and flagrant that a free and fair election was not possible.7 I do not know today’s count. Nobody does yet.
None of it refutes anything and none of it fulfills anything. It is open. The honest verb for an open account is not believe and not doubt. It is keep.
In Matthew, Jesus does not correct the misquotation. He says nothing about the skipped clause or whose lines they were. He answers a cut text with another text and one word in front of it. It is written again. Not it is written correctly. Again. The remedy for a verse read short was never the longer verse. It was the next reading, the one that comes back to the same page on a Wednesday because a calendar said to, and finds a semicolon where it had remembered a period.
The other psalm on today’s calendar spends its second verse giving its own soul an order: forget not all his benefits. Which is only necessary for a soul that is going to. In the English, if you are in a legalistic mood, forget not all can be read as do not forget every single one of them.
I managed that. I kept one.