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 you only find out about at the bottom.
Two men, then. One is a prophet in the eighth century BC who paid his own fare to Tarshish to get away from an assignment, slept through a storm that terrified professional sailors, and ended up over the side and inside a fish. The other is somebody in a hospital corridor at two in the afternoon, or in a parked car outside a building, with the presentable words gone and about one sentence left.
The distance between them is real. Jonah's disaster was entirely self-inflicted and he knew it; most bottoms are not that tidy, and it is worth refusing the tidiness rather than making everyone's crisis into a lesson about disobedience. But listen to what he actually prays, because it is not what a man in his position would be expected to say. There is no case. No explanation, no bargaining, no undertaking to do better. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD. That is all. And then: my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.
Sit with that second clause. He is as far from the temple as a man can physically get, under water, inside an animal, in a place he steered himself into. And the prayer arrives. The delivery was not affected by the address. He says two lines later that they that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy, which is him naming what he had done, and then simply, salvation is of the LORD.
So the short prayer arrives from anywhere, and it does not require a preamble, and it does not have to be prayed in a holy place to land in one.
Which raises the only real question here: what have you been waiting to be, or to have fixed, before you said it?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 100 is The Chain of Questions (Amos 3:3).