Daily Manna · Day 110 · April 20
Eyes and Ears Open
“The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry.”
What did you expect prayer to feel like by now?
I ask because you would not be the first to find it has gone flat. You still say the words at night, and they land the way talking lands in a room the other person left an hour ago. Nobody warns you about that, and most of what gets said about it is unhelpful, since it usually implies the flatness is a diagnosis.
Look at the verse, though, and at the two lines around it, because David is being more precise than the verse alone suggests. The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry. The next line is the hard half, where the same face that is turned toward the righteous is set against people who do evil. The attention described here is aimed, not ambient; this is not a claim that God is generally well disposed. And then the third line tells you who the righteous turn out to be, in this psalm, written by a man who had recently pretended to be insane to save his own life: they are the ones whose hearts have been broken, and God is standing near them. Not people who never fell. People who ran to him.
Open is the word I would have you keep. Not attentive when addressed properly. Open, which is a description of a state, not a response to your performance. There is no appointment, no gatekeeper, no phrasing that qualifies a cry as admissible.
Lord, I have been composing. I edit before I speak, and then I wonder why it sounds like talking in a room somebody left an hour ago. Here is one unedited sentence about the thing I have been circling for a month, in the words I actually think it in. Bad grammar. No conclusion. Nothing attached to the end of it. Your ears are open; you said so yourself. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 110 is Made a Watchman (Ezekiel 3:17).