Mercy Like Morning: A 7-Day Devotionalنموونە

Dig Your Well

“Dig your well,” Shawna said one day back when I was in college. I had been sitting on her couch and lamenting my struggle through singleness when the pastor’s wife (who would later become my best friend) taught me her most important life lesson.

It was a reference from Psalm 84:6 and the people who pilgrim-pass through the Valley of Baca and make it a spring—or, as it can also be translated, a well. The pilgrims traveling through drew water from that spring-well before continuing on their way.

“Dig your well for yourself,” she said, “and also for the people who follow along after you. Do it now, while you are single and can dig a little bit deeper and linger a little bit longer.” She had a point.

Shawna had been digging her own well for years with regular quiet times, letting God fill it with the water of His Word. And that afternoon, I sipped her handmade iced coffee and drank from her dug-out-well wisdom.

Of all the things she taught me, that was what stuck. To dig down—and dig deep. Every day, coming to God’s presence whether or not I wanted to, whether or not I had the time or the inclination. In the good days and the ones full of tears. Dig in and dig down and dig deep into His Word. So that when life got busy, and there was marriage and a mortgage and little ones at my morning-feet, I could draw from my dug-out-daily well. And then, years later, after I buried her and found myself walking through the desert, I drank from it.

As it turns out, His mercy-spring is fresh every morning. And when you approach your dug-out well new every morning, something incredible happens. The Hebrew word that’s used for every morning in Lamentations 3:23 gets its meaning from the breaking forth of light through the darkness (because even when all is dark, His mercy remains). But the root word for every morning takes it one step further, describing a cleaving and an opening that is applied to that breaking forth of light. It’s also applied to the sense of asking and inquiring, searching out and investigating, and diligently inspecting.

His mercies are new every morning, just waiting for you to dig them up and search them out and look them over in that breaking-forth light of His.