Green pastures

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul." — Psalm 23:1-3 (KJV)

I have read this psalm ten thousand times and this morning it stopped me at green.

Green pastures. I am sitting at the kitchen table in late October and the pasture outside this window is brown. The grass is cut stubble. The garden is bare. The trees are losing what color they had left and the woods past the pasture are turning to the gray they will be until April, and the psalmist says green pastures and still waters and I am looking at brown stubble and a bare garden and a sky the color of a nickel.

That is the whole point.

The psalm does not say he leadeth me into green pastures when the pastures are green. It says green pastures. It says he maketh me to lie down, which is not the same as he inviteth me to lie down, which would leave the decision with me. He maketh. It is not a suggestion. It is a provision, and the provision does not wait for the season.

I have known green-pasture mornings. This morning is not one. This morning is a brown-pasture morning, a bare-garden morning, a gray-woods morning, and the psalmist — who knew sheep and knew seasons and knew what a field looks like in the months when nothing is growing — said green, and I believe him, because I have been reading this psalm for sixty-five years and the psalm has never yet been wrong about the pasture, even when the pasture looks wrong about the psalm.

He restoreth my soul. I notice the verb is past tense in the KJV, which means it has already happened, which means I do not need to wait for it, which means it is happening now, in the brown pasture, in the bare garden, in the cold kitchen with the coffee and the dog by the stove and the woods going gray outside the window.

Lord, the pasture is brown and you say green. I believe you.