The Valley Becomes a Spring

There's a worn path across almost every open lot, and it's never where the sidewalk is.

Somebody cut that corner once because it was shorter. Then somebody else followed it because there was already a line in the grass. Now it's a trail, and nobody who walks it is deciding anything. They're just using what got made by everybody who went before them.

Psalm 84 is about people walking to a feast.

It's a pilgrim song. Three times a year people walked to Jerusalem, and depending on where you started, that was days on foot with your family and whatever you could carry. The psalm opens the way you'd expect, with a man homesick for a building.

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the LORD.” (Psalm 84:1-2, ESV)

He goes on about the sparrow finding a home and the swallow a nest near the altar, which is a striking thing to be jealous of. Birds live there. He doesn't. He has to walk.

“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. As they go through the Valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength.” (Psalm 84:5-7, ESV)

Baca means weeping. It may also be the name of an actual dry valley on the route. A stretch with no water in it that you simply had to cross to get where you were going.

The psalm doesn't say God moved the valley. It doesn't say they found a way around. The road to the place they wanted ran straight through the dry part, and the only way to arrive was to walk it.

What it says instead is that they made it a place of springs.

People argue about how literally to take that. But something about people crossing that valley on their way to God left it wetter than they found it. Maybe they dug. Maybe the rains came behind them. Either way, the dry stretch didn't stay dry, and the ones who changed it were people who never asked to be there in the first place.

They go from strength to strength.

That is not how walking works. You go from strength to tired. Anybody who has done a long day on foot knows the direction that arrow points. But the psalm says the opposite, and it says it specifically about the group that just came through the driest part of the trip.

There are people who have been through something that should have taken the legs out from under them, and they're steadier now than they were before. Not louder. Not shinier. Steadier. And they're usually the ones other people find their way to when it's their turn in the valley.

Whatever dry stretch you're in the middle of, you are probably not the first one across it, and you will not be the last. Somebody left water in it for you. Somebody is going to come along behind you and find it easier because you went through.

You don't get to skip the valley. You do get to leave it different.

“For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.” (Psalm 84:10, ESV)

He's still walking when he writes that. He hasn't gotten there yet. He just knows where the road goes.