Daily Manna · Day 126 · May 6
As Your Soul Prospers
“Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”
Picture the object itself: one sheet of papyrus, roughly the size of a page, the standard length of an ordinary letter in the Roman world. Not a treatise. A note carried by hand from an old man to a friend, in a church where things had gone wrong.
The trouble is named further down. A man called Diotrephes loveth to have the preeminence, will not receive the travelling brothers, and puts out of the church the people who do. Gaius is one of the people who do. He is still opening his door to strangers after the man in charge has closed his, and he is paying for it. That is the situation into which the second line of the letter falls: Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.
It is the ordinary opening of a Greek letter, and John bends it. Everybody wished their correspondent health; that was the form. What John adds is a measuring stick, and it runs the opposite way from ours. He never says the soul should catch up to the body. He says the soul is the part already doing well, and he wants the rest to come up to that level. He is not despising the body. He is telling a man under pressure from his own congregation which part of him he has read correctly.
So pray it, in these words or your own. Father, you can see the part of me nobody asks about. Make it prosper. Where my health and my work and my house are running ahead of my soul, hold them until the rest of me arrives. And for anyone I know who is keeping a door open at cost, do this for them, and let them find out today that somebody noticed. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 126 is Try My Reins (Psalm 26:2).