Delight Is the Difference

Psalm 1:2. The blessed person, the psalm says, delights in the law of the LORD and meditates on it day and night. Notice the word delight. Not endures, not completes, not checks off. Delight. The first psalm does not begin by telling us to obey. It begins by describing someone who has found in God's instruction something worth returning to at breakfast and again at midnight.

That is a quiet challenge for a Friday in late May. Many of us read Scripture the way we take vitamins, quickly and out of duty. The psalmist describes something closer to the way a person rereads a letter from someone they love. Meditation here is not emptying the mind. It is turning a phrase over, murmuring it, letting it settle.

The good news is that delight can be learned. It grows the way appetite grows, by tasting. Today, read one psalm slowly, twice. Ask God to make it sweet. He is the one who plants trees by streams, and he is not stingy with water.