Every Step an Arrival

Walk through the pages of the Bible in 90 days with a definitive voice in Christian spirituality. In this devotional, Eugene Peterson provides brief commentary and challenging thoughts designed to stir the biblical imagination and encourage even the weary believer.

Life is a mixture of deep joy, heartbreaking disappointment, and hopeful dreams. We long for quick answers, yet God invites us into something far better—a dance of worship, wonder, and mystery.

Discover this beautiful rhythm in Every Step an Arrival, a ninety-day devotional from the beloved translator behind the popular Message Bible and the author of spiritual classics, including Run with the Horses and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.

Eugene Peterson believes our confusion about the world comes from a lack of clarity regarding who we are and, more important, who God is. Each reading focuses on a unique facet of God’s nature or of our identity. Drawing insights and stories from a number of books in the Old Testament, Peterson stirs the imagination and encourages travel-weary readers to keep moving forward.

Life is full of unexpected moments. But when we enter each day in rhythm with God, every step is an arrival.Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message Bible, authored more than thirty books, including the spiritual classics Run with the Horses and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. He earned a degree in philosophy from Seattle Pacific University, a graduate degree in theology from New York Theological Seminary, and a master’s degree in Semitic languages from John Hopkins University. He also received several honorary doctoral degrees. He was founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, where he and his wife, Jan, served for twenty-nine years. Peterson held the title of professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, British Columbia from 1998 until his death in 2018.

Day 1: The Contrast of Darkness and Light

There is significance in the first day’s creative act: God said, “Light!” And light appeared. The universe is established with God’s light shining through everything. There is a profound understanding of this in the way in which a day is described in Genesis and subsequently in all Jewish life. “And there was evening and there was morning, one day” (verse 5, RSV). An odd way to describe a day, but not if you see it as a victory of God’s light. Evening has the sense, in Hebrew, of termination, bringing to a conclusion. A day is described first as the conclusion of the creative work of God, then night, a time of sleep, the incursion of darkness, a threat to the order of creation, a sign of chaos to come. Does night or light have the last word? The answer is in the phrase “and there was morning, one day.”

Morning in Hebrew has the meaning of “penetration.” [1] God’s day is not complete until light shines again, penetrating the darkness and dispersing the shadows. The creative action of God is light, which encloses and limits a temporary darkness. All that we see as a threat to God’s creative action is held in check and controlled by his light. The shadows are there—night descends upon life—and there is that which seems to defy God, to disturb his order and his purpose: sickness, death, trouble, and sorrow. But it does not have the last word: “And there was morning, one day.”

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Identify an area of your life in which you need God’s light to penetrate the dimness. Will night or light have the last word? Talk with God about the clarity you seek.

 

 

[1]. Strong’s Concordance, s.v. “boqer: morning,” http://biblehub.com/hebrew/1242.htm.