This week I keep coming back to the same picture. Not a building this time, but a tree.

Psalm 1 says the one who delights in the law of the Lord, who meditates on it day and night, is like a tree planted near streams of water. It bears fruit in its season. Its leaves never wither. Whatever it does prospers.

I used to hear that as a kind of trade. Read your Bible and good things follow, like a transaction. I don’t think that’s what the Psalm is saying. A tree by a stream isn’t strong because it works hard at growing leaves. It’s strong because of what it’s planted next to. The roots pull from something the tree didn’t create and can’t run out of.

That’s what this whole week keeps circling back to for me. The parable of the two builders, the cornerstone, reading Scripture like it was actually meant to be understood. All of it comes back to the same thing. I’m not the source. I’m just trying to stay planted near one.

So today, less to figure out and more to ask. Where am I actually planted? What am I closest to on an ordinary day, the stream or something that will run dry?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. I’m just sitting with the question this weekend. Maybe you are too.

Today’s Bible Study

Psalm 1 is about being planted near the water. John 15:5 makes it specific. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. The stream isn’t just Scripture in the abstract. It’s a person. Jesus doesn’t say whoever works hard enough will bear fruit. He says whoever remains. Remaining is the part I forget. It isn’t one dramatic decision to stay planted. It’s a hundred small returns, today and tomorrow and the day after that.

Recommended Reading

If you want to sit with Psalm 1 longer than a single reading, try praying it as part of the Liturgy of the Hours. I’ve started using an app called iBreviary, and it’s a quiet way to let a psalm like this settle instead of just reading it once and moving on.