Jeremiah 29:7 (bonus verse, not in our reading today) says, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Paul was a diligent student of scripture, and I wonder if he may have had this verse in mind in places like Malta where he prayed to heal people and became an object lesson for God’s protection. God was with him, and so God was with those people as well. It’s certainly reasonable to believe that Paul’s good works and miracles in these places bore fruit, for certainly being exposed to God cannot leave a person unchanged.

(For this cycle through the Psalms, I m reading from “The Hebrew Bible” translation by Robert Alter.)