Daily Manna · Day 100 · April 10
Prayer from the Bottom
“When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.”
There is a kind of praying that people often discover only when they have hit the bottom.
Think of two people. One is Jonah, a prophet who lived around the eighth century before Christ. God gave him a job, and he ran from it, paying his own fare on a ship bound for Tarshish. He slept through a storm that terrified the sailors, men who handled storms for a living. In the end he was thrown over the side and swallowed by a great fish. The other is someone sitting in a hospital corridor at two in the afternoon, or in a parked car outside a building. The polished words are gone, and there is about one sentence left.
The two are not the same. Jonah's disaster was entirely his own doing, and he knew it. Most people's low points are not so simple, and we should not turn everyone's crisis into a lesson about disobedience. But listen to what Jonah prays in this verse. He makes no case for himself here, with no explaining and no bargaining. "When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD." That is all. Then he says, "and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple."
Stay with that second part for a moment. Jonah is about as far from the temple as a man can get: under the sea, inside a fish, in a place he steered himself into. And still his prayer arrives. Where he was did not stop it from reaching God. In the next verse he names what he had done wrong: "They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy." Lying vanities are false and empty things that people trust instead of God. And then he says simply, "Salvation is of the LORD."
So a short prayer can reach God from anywhere. It does not need a long introduction, and it does not have to be prayed in a holy place to arrive in one.
That leaves one real question. What have you been waiting to become, or waiting to fix, before you would say that one sentence to God? You do not need to wait any longer. The same Lord who heard Jonah from the bottom of the sea is listening to you now.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 100 is The Chain of Questions (Amos 3:3).